Biography
Cucker was born in Montevideo in 1958.[1][2][3] Due to the situation in Uruguay in the 70s, he emigrated to Spain to study the bachelor of mathematics at the University of Barcelona,[2][3] which he completed in 1983. He obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Cantabria and University of Rennes 1 in 1986 under the supervision Tomás Recio and Michel Coste. His thesis was about Nash functions on real algebraic varieties.[1][4]
From 1987 to 1992 Cucker was professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.[1][3]
In 1992 Cucker became professor at the recently created Pompeu Fabra University.[3] In 1995 he was promoted to chair professor at this university.[3]
In 1993 he organized the workshop Continuous Algorithms and Complexity at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica in Barcelona[5][6] where he started his long-term collaboration with Lenore Blum, Michael Shub, and Steve Smale.[3] In 1996 he moved with them to the City University of Hong Kong to write the book Complexity and Real Computation.[2][3] Although this was intended as a temporal position,[3] Cucker would stay in Hong Kong and became an associate professor of this university in 1998, full professor in 2003, and chair professor in 2006.[1]
Cucker was one of the founders of the nonprofit association Foundations of Computational Mathematics, of which he has been a member of the Board of Directors since its creation in 1995 until 2017. Additionally, Cucker was Chair of this society from 2008 to 2011 and Editor-in-Chief of its journal from 2011 to 2017.[1][7][8]
In 2006 Cucker was named foreign member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona.[1][9]
From 2017 to 2019 Cucker was Einstein Visiting Fellow of the Berlin Mathematical School and the Technical University Berlin.[3][10]
In 2019, the conference Complexity of numerical computation: A conference in honor of Felipe Cucker was organised at the Technical University of Berlin in Berlin celebrating his work.[11]
Since 2018 he is Head of the Mathematics Department at City University of Hong Kong.[3][12]
Work
During the 90s, he worked in the complexity classes that appear when dealing with the Blum–Shub–Smale machine. In 1998, he co-authored one of the fundamental books in this topic, Complexity and Real Computation, together with Lenore Blum, Michael Shub, and Steve Smale.[1]
In the 2000s he focused on the analysis of numerical algorithms in linear programming. Together with Dennis Cheung he introduced the notions of the GCC condition number in linear programming.[13]
In 2007 together with Steve Smale he proposed the so-called Cucker-Smale flocking model. This model, which has received extensive attention in mathematics and other fields,[14] plays an important role in the mathematical study of flocking dynamics.[1][15]
In 2011 together with Peter Bürgisser he contributed to the solution of Smale's 17th problem.[1]
In 2013 Cucker won an Honorable Mention in the Category of Mathematics of the PROSE Awards for his book Manifold Mirrors: The Crossing Paths of the Arts and Mathematics, which dealt with mathematics and art.[16]
