Control Theory in Denver
October 18, 2009
In 2005 and again this year, the SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory held its biennial conference in conjunction with the SIAM Annual Meeting. Such combined meetings give a group the chance to make its research directions and successes known beyond its own membership, to the broader SIAM community. Success stories reliably emerge from prize lectures, as in those given by the recipients of the three SIAG/CST prizes awarded in Denver, as well as Anders Lindquist's Reid Prize lecture).
Rafal Goebel, an assistant professor of mathematics at Loyola University Chicago, received the SIAG/CST Prize for "developing novel and fundamental results for in-depth study of hybrid systems and resolving some long-standing issues in these systems, such as well-posedness of solutions and robustness of asymptotic stability in hybrid control systems." He presented some of his results in the prize lecture, "Hybrid Inclusions: A Framework for Modeling and Analysis of Hybrid Dynamical Systems."
Presented for the first time in 2009 was the SIAG/CST Best SICON Paper Prize. The prize recognizes the authors of the two papers judged by the prize committee to be the most outstanding among those published in SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization in 2007�08. One of the prizes went to Yves Achdou of l'Universit� Paris Diderot, whose paper, according to the prize committee, "formulates and solves a difficult inverse problem arising in stochastic finance. The author uses sophisticated mathematics to calibrate an options model with observed prices."
The other prize-winning paper, by Luc Bouten of Caltech, Ramon van Handel of Princeton University, and Matthew James of the Australian National University (left to right), was commended as "an in-depth introduction to two of the most important and complex subjects of modern science, nonlinear filtering and quantum mechanics." The paper was also cited for combining "mathematical rigor with elegant style."
