José F. Escobar

José Fernando "Chepe" Escobar (born 20 December 1954, in Manizales, Colombia) was a Colombian mathematician known for his work on differential geometry and partial differential equations. He was professor at Cornell University.[1][2]

He completed his mathematical undergraduate program at Universidad del Valle, Colombia. He received a scholarship that permitted him to do a master in science studies in the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Escobar obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986, under the supervision of Richard Schoen.[3] In his thesis he solved the problem known as "the boundary Yamabe problem", that had been previously settled only for the case of manifolds without boundary.[2]

He died from cancer on 3 January 2004, at the age 49.[2]

Among the awards he received for his work were "the Alfred Sloan Fellowship" and "the Presidential Faculty Fellowship" (received at the White House directly from the hands of the President of the United States).[4]

Mathematician Fernando Codá Marques was a student of him.[3]