Great Spanish Mathematicians

A few months ago, my old poker-school confrere Frank Spain came back from Ciudad Real to bury his father, and we renewed acquintance. Later, he sent me a copy of some magazine with an article "Cerebros al cuadrado", by Monica Salamone. It was about the top Spanish mathematicians.

Who are they? Turns out they are:

• Enrique Zuazua Iriondo (at the Autónoma, Madrid), working on PDE (partial differential equations)
• Jesús Sanz Serna, (Rector at Valladolid). Founder of the Spanish Applied Maths Society, now rector of the university, (-- "Así que ya no investiga").
• David Nualart (Kansas) Working in applied probability, especially market models.
• Juan Luis Vázquez (Autónoma, Madrid), working on applied nonlinear diffusion problems, such as the flow of water in a porous medium.

Did I know them, said Frank? No. Would they have been top of my list? No. Is that strange?

No. The list was arrived at by taking the most cited scientists in the world, in all fields, and then looking at the Spaniards. It turns out that there are more mathematicians among them than practioners of any other field, and these are the most cited of those.

Great people, no doubt. But citation-counts, based on ISI and the like, measure something other than an article's impact on its field.