Daniele Di Pietro: the maths aesthete

Daniele Di Pietro speaks a language unlike any other. Not Italian, his native tongue, but the language of mathematics, the language that brought him from Italy to Montpellier. Derivatives, partial differential equations, polytopal methods: words that didn't sound like sirens in his ears at the time. And with good reason: the current director of the Alexandre Grothendieck Institute in Montpellier, named after another great mathematician, was destined for a career in numerical fluid mechanics. However, he made a change of direction in the early stages of his thesis, when he metAlessandro Veneziani, a mathematician with a passion for his profession, who instilled in him a taste for numerical analysis.

" At that time, I also realized that I wouldn't get anywhere without maths, because I didn't have enough physical intuition to develop digital simulators," recalls Daniele Di Pietro. And that's just as well, because the young doctoral student at the time " clearly has maths skills. It's a formalized language that can be used in all disciplines, because the first stage of research is precisely to formalize a problem ". Math? It's everywhere," reminds the researcher, " in your computer, on your phone, everywhere . Universal, yet so complicated to share. " Getting others to understand our research by translating it into everyday language is a real mathematical difficulty and challenge. Even with our colleagues, we sometimes only understand each other 20%: we all speak the same language, but with different dialects ".

Aesthetic dimension

Fueled by this new passion, Daniele Di Pietro moved to Lausanne after his thesis to work in numerical analysis, landing in France in 2007 with a post-doc at Ecole des Ponts, before quickly landing a research position at Ifpen. An exponential career, which continues with an appointment as professor at the University of Montpellier in 2012, at just 33 years of age, where he focuses his research on the development and analysis of innovative numerical methods for partial differential equations. His mathematical research takes on an aesthetic dimension, in the words of Daniele Di Pietro: "I like to find beauty in mathematics, the kind that comes from an idea, a spark ".

With over 100 publications to his credit, the aesthete-mathematician who has been heading IMAG for 3 years now is delighted with the attractiveness of a laboratory that has recruited 4 research directors since the beginning of his mandate, an exceptional situation. " Research in mathematics is very active, and IMAG has particularly distinguished itself in the submission of projects ", explains Daniele Di Pietro. And the latest is no mean feat: the researcher has just been awarded an ERC synergy, " the largest projects funded by the European Research Council, for which we obtained 7.8 million euros, including 4.4 million for IMAG ", explains the laboratory director, who is accompanied by three other internationally renowned researchers: Jérôme Droniou from IMAG, Paola Antonietti from Milan's Politecnico and Lourenço Beirão da Veiga from the University of Milan Bicocca.

Telling a good story

The aim of the NEMESIS project is to develop innovative numerical methods for partial differential equations, in order to design a more flexible approach to the numerical simulation of physical problems. " It's a difficult project to explain, because the multidisciplinary jury is not made up exclusively of mathematicians: we had to make sure that everyone understood," explains the researcher, for whom writing a project is a bit like telling a story. "It's a bit like choosing the right characters to tell a good story, in which you're the hero, of course, because you're proposing to solve the problem presented.

And to explain this major project, the researcher also explains what it could be used for. " Several applications are targeted by Némésis, including magnetohydrodynamics, involved for example in aluminum smelting, and flows in porous and fractured media, which are involved in CO2 storage processes or risk assessment in nuclear waste storage."

Feminizing mathematics

Daniele Di Pietro is delighted with this exceptional funding, but also says he's "going to keep him busy. It's a huge project, and it's also a lot of pressure . Next step: recruit a dozen PhD and post-doctoral students at IMAG to work on NEMESIS. " It's difficult, because we're looking for excellent, highly autonomous profiles: we need to find candidates of the highest calibre ". Candidates? Mathematics has long been a very male-dominated field of research, " admits the researcher, " but in recent years the discipline has been catching up considerably in this area, and the milieu is becoming much more feminized ", explains the IMAG director, with a clear determination to ensure equal opportunities for men and women. "Of course, our primary recruitment criterion remains excellence. But, at an equal level, we give priority to hiring women in order to catch up with the parity gap.

The next major problem facing the IMAG director will be accommodation. " To accommodate the new recruits, we're going to have to push out the walls ". In the meantime, the mathematician has made his first investment, which will be displayed on his desk in January 2024: a very large screen. He has thus abandoned the blackboard, which nurtures the Epinal image of the mathematician writing equations that are incomprehensible to the average person? " You have to admit that the image is partly true, but I'm allergic to chalk," confesses Daniele Di Pietro. A peculiarity which keeps him away from the blackboard, but which hasn't prevented him from proudly pinning this ERC on an already well-filled roll of honour.