Athanasios S. Fokas

Athanassios Spyridon Fokas (; born 30 June 1952) is a United Kingdom–based Greek academic, educator and scientist, with degrees in Aeronautical Engineering and Medicine. Since 2002, he is Professor of Nonlinear Mathematical Science in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge.

Education Fokas earned a BS in Aeronautics from Imperial College in 1975 and a PhD in Applied mathematics from Caltech in 1979. His dissertation, Invariants, Lie-Backlund Operators and Backlund Transformations, was written under the direction of Paco Axel Lagerstrom. He was elected a Member of the Academy of Athens in 2004 and a professorial fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge in 2005.

Research contributions Fokas has written about symmetries, integrable nonlinear PDEs, Painlevé equations and random matrices, models for leukemia and protein folding, electro-magneto-enchephalography, nuclear imaging, and relativistic gravity. Also, he has introduced a new method for solving boundary value problems known as the Fokas method.

I. M. Gelfand, a mathematician, who has also written about biology, in the citation for the Aristeion prize, wrote Fokas is now a very rare example of a scientist in the style of the Renaissance".

Awards Fokas received the Naylor Prize from the London Mathematical Society in 2000. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009). He was awarded a Blaise Pascal Medal and elected to the Mathematics section of Academia Europaea in 2023. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the 2024 class of fellows.

Personal life Fokas is married to Regina Karousou-Fokas with whom he has two children, Anastasia and Ioanna.

Books M J Ablowitz and A S Fokas, Complex Variables: Introduction and Applications, Cambridge University Press, second edition (2003) A S Fokas, A R Its, A A Kapaev and V Yu Novokshenov, Painlevé Transcendents: A Riemann-Hilbert Approach, AMS (2006) A S Fokas, A Unified Approach to Boundary Value Problems , CBMS-SIAM (2008) A S Fokas and B. Pelloni, eds, Unified Transform for Boundary Value Problems: Applications and advances, SIAM (2015).