Monday, July 25/2:15 PM/Grande Ballroom

The Theodore von Karman Prize

The Theodore von Karman Prize, established in 1968, is awarded for a notable application of mathematics to mechanics and/or the engineering sciences made during the five to ten years preceding the award. The award may be given either for a single notable achievement or for a collection of such achievements.

The 1994 recipient is Herbert B. Keller, California Institute of Technology.

Chair: Avner Friedman, Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Problems With Infinitely Many Solutions and Their Numerical Approximation

Many parameter dependent problems in science and technology are such that the number of solutions that exist changes as the parameters change. Cases of particular importance are those for which a denumerable number of solutions exist for a fixed parameter value. Several such problems and numerical methods for approximating their solutions will be presented. Problems in which these questions are open at present will be included.

Herbert B. Keller, Applied Mathematics Division, California Institute of Technology

Herbert B. Keller has been a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology since 1967. Previously he was a Professor at the Courant Institute of New York University, from which he received his PhD in 1954. Professor Keller is a past president of SIAM (1975-76), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, a Guggenheim Fellow, and he was the Distinguished Visiting Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, England in 1993-94. Currently he is Director of the Caltech branch of the NSF-sponsored Center for Research on Parallel Computation.

Professor Keller is an applied mathematician who specializes in numerical analysis and scientific computing. His recent work is concerned with numerical methods for continuation and path following, bifurcation theory, homotopy methods and computational fluid dynamics.