Profile
Mark J. Ablowitz

Mark J. Ablowitz (b. 1945 in New York, NY) is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has a BS from the University of Rochester in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. from MIT in Mathematics. Ablowitz is an applied mathematician who is interested in solutions of nonlinear wave equations. Certain nonlinear equations are special; e.g. for appropriate data they can be linearized by the Inverse Scattering Transform (IST) and they possess solitons as special solutions. Their similarity solutions lead to special ODEs which have the Painlevé property; i.e. ODEs which do not have moveable branch point singularities. ODEs with the Painlevé property contain the well-known Painlevé equations which are special second order scalar equations; their solutions are often called Painlevé transcendents. Some of the relationships between IST and Painlevé equations are discussed in two books: Solitons and the Inverse Scattering Transform and Solitons, Nonlinear Evolution Equations and Inverse Scattering. Widespread interest in Painlevé equations re-emerged in the 1970s and thereafter partially due to the connection with IST and integrable systems.

Ablowitz has written five books, more than 240 refereed journal articles and has been invited to lecture at hundreds of universities, conferences and laboratories throughout the world. He was named as a SIAM Fellow, 2011 and an AMS Fellow in 2012. He has been a Sloan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and is listed as a highly cited mathematician by ISI Web of Science.

In November 2015, Ablowitz was named a Senior Associate Editor of the DLMF.