Joaquim Ortega Cerdà elected to the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters

Professor Joaquim Ortega Cerdà, from the University of Barcelona, has been elected as a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, Norway’s oldest scientific and scholarly institution and one of Europe’s oldest and most respected academic institutions.

Founded in 1760 in Trondheim, the Society brings together researchers from a broad range of disciplines, with the aim of promoting science, scholarship, and international collaboration. Membership is offered to individuals whose work has made a meaningful contribution to their field.

Ortega has spent much of his academic life working in complex analysis, particularly in the study of the inhomogeneous Cauchy–Riemann equation, Bergman kernels, and sampling and interpolation problems. His research also touches on Dirichlet series, viewed from the perspective of infinite-dimensional analysis, and more recently, on random point processes and optimal configurations.

After completing his PhD at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, he held research and teaching positions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, and eventually joined the University of Barcelona in 1997, where he continues to teach and work today.

Over the years, Ortega has maintained strong ties with the mathematical communities in Norway and Scandinavia, spending time at the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo, the Universities of Gothenburg and Trondheim, and the Mittag-Leffler Institute, among others. In 2016, he was invited to give a lecture at the European Congress of Mathematics.

Rather than viewing the nomination as a personal distinction, Ortega sees it as an opportunity to continue building bridges:

“First of all, it’s a recognition of a long history of collaborations with Norwegian mathematicians. It’s also a chance to strengthen those ties and to exchange ideas with colleagues from other disciplines, especially at a time when parts of society are casting doubt on scientific knowledge — as we’ve seen in recent debates around vaccines or climate models. In this context, I think academies can play an important role as spaces for dialogue, especially within the European sphere.”

His words reflect a broader view of science—not just as a pursuit of understanding, but as a shared endeavor that depends on trust, openness, and international cooperation.