Gigliola Staffilani

Gigliola Staffilani is an Italian-American mathematician who works as the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research concerns harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, including the Korteweg–de Vries equation and Schrödinger equation.

Staffilani grew up on a farm in Martinsicuro in central Italy, speaking only the local dialect, and with no books until her older brother brought some back from his school. Her father died when she was 10, and her mother decided that she did not need to continue on to high school, but her brother helped her change her mother's mind. She came to love mathematics at her school, and was encouraged by her teachers and brother to continue her studies, with the idea that she could return to Martinsicuro as a mathematics teacher. She earned a fellowship to study at the University of Bologna, where she earned a laurea in mathematics in 1989 with an undergraduate thesis on Green's functions for elliptic partial differential equations.

At the suggestion of one of her professors at Bologna, she moved to the University of Chicago for her graduate studies, to study with Carlos Kenig. This was a big change in her previous plans, because it would mean that she could not return to Martinsicuro. When she arrived at Chicago, still knowing very little English and not having taken the Test of English as a Foreign Language, she had the wrong type of visa to obtain the teaching fellowship she had been promised. She almost returned home, but remained after Paul Sally intervened and loaned her enough money to get by until the issue could be resolved. At Chicago, she studied dispersive partial differential equations with Kenig, earning a master's degree in 1991 and a Ph.D. in 1995.

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