The brilliant young Catalan mathematician who wants to decipher what moves the world

Barcelona"Mathematics is very creative, it contains great beauty," says Xavier Ros-Oton (Barcelona, ​​​​1988) with a frank smile. Nothing to do, he insists, with what we learn as children at school: calculus, calculus, calculus, equations, formulas, algorithms that you don't know what they're for... That's why, although he did very well as a child and had a mother who taught precisely this subject, the truth is that it didn't appeal to him too much.

The first time he surprised himself by enjoying it was during some kangaroo tests, in secondary school, a kind of pre-university competition to bring this discipline closer to young people"I remember that they presented us with interesting problems, problems that required thinking, solving, deduction, and logical reasoning, and that had an impact on me. For the first time, I saw the beautiful side of mathematics," he acknowledges.

This young man, now an ICREA research professor and a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Barcelona, ​​​​smashed it up in the kangaroo courts, and from there he made the leap to the Catalan, Spanish, and international Olympiads. Since then, his life has been linked to mathematics, in which he earned his doctorate from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). He has also researched this discipline at the University of Texas, in Austin (USA), and at the University of Zurich. He is an international figure: he is the most cited young mathematician in the world and is considered one of the brightest on the planet.

His work is a world reference in the field of partial differential equations, "the equations that move the world," as Ros-Oton likes to define them, and which constitute the language in which most of the laws of physics, biology, health, and finance are written. That's why he was awarded this year. ex aequo in the Young Talent category of the National Research Awards, the most important distinction awarded in our country in scientific matters, and promoted by the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation and the Ministry of Research and Universities. He also has the honor of becoming the first mathematician to receive it in the young category.

"The awards are a recognition of all the people I collaborate with and my students," he says, and asserts that mathematics is, arguably, the most collaborative science. "We don't have laboratories; all the research and articles are done by working at the blackboard; traveling to meet, explaining everything we know so that, together, we can solve a problem, not for the one next to us to win."

Mathematics in Politics

PDEs, as the field he researches from his office at the UB is known in scientific jargon, equipped only with an old-fashioned blackboard (green and plaster) and a computer, originated in physics in the 17th century. Every physical theory has a related fundamental equation, for example, fluid dynamics and the Navier-Stokes equations; relativity and Einstein's equations; or quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's equations.

Mathematicians study these equations and try to understand them. "We develop the mathematical theory necessary to be able to apply them," explains this mathematician. For example, financial markets use a type of PDEs called Black-Scholes, which are a mathematical model that explains the dynamics of the financial market. But in fact, they are present in almost all areas of knowledge. They are used to study population dynamics in biology, and to make forecasts related to the climate crisis and meteorology. They are also used to design the aerodynamics of an airplane or car. And they can even be used to make better decisions.

"We would be much better off if our politicians had scientific and mathematical knowledge," believes this young man, who uses former US President Barack Obama as an example. "He had scientific thinking, made decisions based on mathematical probabilities. He consulted with experts, relied on algorithms to calculate options, and he did quite well," thinks Ros-Oton, for whom mathematics must play a decisive role in any decision-making and strategic forecasting for the future, even more so with the emergence of...

"In schools, for example, it could be used to predict which students are most at risk of failing at school in the future, in order to provide the necessary resources to avoid it. Or to detect problems early. Statistics is a very powerful tool," he explains, adding that in the US it is already used to discover and sign players. We also find companies like Netflix that use mathematics to get ahead of customers most likely to unsubscribe from the service, offering them recommendations that will impact them and thus prevent them from doing so.

Paradoxically, this researcher explains, although the demand for mathematicians has grown significantly in the last decade, Catalan universities are not offering more places for these studies. "Adding the three faculties (UPC, UB, and UAB), there are still 300 places, far fewer than those for psychology at the UB. We have the same number of students as 30 or 40 years ago. And that's a problem," he says. Girls have also stopped seeing them as attractive. "The fact that mathematics has been equated with engineering and other technical degrees makes it seem more competitive. And, as a counterpart, the gender gap has increased," he concludes.