Enrico Giusti

Enrico Giusti (born Priverno, 1940), is an Italian mathematician mainly known for his contributions to the fields of calculus of variations, regularity theory of partial differential equations, minimal surfaces and history of mathematics.

He has been professor of mathematics at the Università di Firenze; he also taught and conducted research at the Australian National University at Canberra, at the Stanford University and at the University of California, Berkeley.

After retirement, he devoted himself to the managing of the "Giardino di Archimede", a museum entirely dedicated to mathematics and its applications.

Giusti is also the editor-in-chief of the international journal, dedicated to the history of mathematics "Bollettino di storia delle scienze matematiche".

One of the most famous results of Giusti, is the one obtained with Enrico Bombieri and Ennio de Giorgi, concerning the minimality of Simons' cones, and allowing to disprove the validity of Bernstein's theorem in dimension larger than 8.

The work on minimal surfaces was mentioned in the citation of the Fields medal eventually awarded to Bombieri in 1974.

Giusti won the Caccioppoli Prize of the Italian Mathematical Union in 1978 and in 2003 was awarded with the national medal for mathematics by the Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze (dei XL).

Giusti has a sustained interest in the history of mathematics, e.g. the mathematics of Pierre de Fermat (see Giusti 2009).

He is currently the director of the Garden of Archimedes, a museum devoted to mathematics in Florence, Italy.