This will be Dr. Temgoua’s second stint in Canada as a Fields Fellow. After completing his Ph.D at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2022, he spent a year as a Fields Postdoctoral Fellow at Carleton University. There, he worked with Prof. Abbas Moameni on supercritical problems, including Hamiltonian systems, with an emphasis on existence, nonexistence, symmetry and symmetry-breaking of solutions. But this will be the first time he gets to complete his fellowship at the Institute’s physical location in Toronto.

“Working at Fields Institute has always been a dream of mine. The fellowship represents a great opportunity to continue working on important mathematical problems while engaging with a dynamic and stimulating research environment,” Dr. Temgoua writes from home in Cameroon, where he is staying after wrapping up a second fellowship at Rutgers University in New Jersey last year.

The journey to a mathematics career is rarely linear, but it almost always involves a spark of fascination that takes root in childhood. For the applied mathematician, his elementary school years spawned an interest in problem solving and logical reasoning. As his education progressed, he was drawn to mathematical structures that describe complex phenomena, leading him to pursue a career in Analysis and Partial Differential Equations. His Ph.D research focused on the study of nonlocal equations with fractional order dependence.

One of the key results of his thesis, which was supervised by Professors Tobias Weth and Mouhamed Mostapha Fall, is the resolution of a conjecture by Banuelos and Kulczycki, which asserts that every second Dirichlet eigenvalue of the fractional Laplacian in the ball is antisymmetric. This result enables us to fully understand the shape of any second eigenfunction of the fractional Laplacian in the ball.

At Fields, Dr. Temgoua will spend the coming year expanding his research expertise in PDEs, but also exploring other areas such as fluid dynamics and optimal mass transport. It is a major draw to be located so close to the University of Toronto mathematics department, where he will be able to access leading experts in those areas, including Prof. Robert McCann.

Of course, it can’t be all work and no play. While he’s in Toronto, Dr. Temgoua is excited to explore some of the city’s vibrant cultural activities, museums, art galleries, parks and – without doubt – the endless culinary adventures provided by our multicultural restaurant scene.

Fields is excited to welcome Dr. Temgoua and we look forward to playing a part in his mathematical journey.