Prize Recipients Honored in Denver
October 18, 2009
J. Tinsley Oden, founding director of ICES---the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences---at the University of Texas, Austin, is the 2009 recipient of the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession. Shown here in Denver with SIAM president Doug Arnold, Oden was honored for "his tireless service to the applied mathematics and mechanics communities in creating influential agency reports, chartering now vigorous professional associations, sustaining numerous journals, and evolving a prominent institute during the emergence of computational science and engineering."
In the course of more than four decades, the citation continues, "Tinsley has served academia, national laboratories, industry and professional societies in several countries as educator, consultant, program developer, and reviewer. . . . A prolific researcher and writer, he injects the perspective of the mathematician---seeking to understand, quantify, and reduce error in engineering approximations---in whatever field he enters, and thus he continually expands the scope and relevance of SIAM itself."
First awarded in 1986, to SIAM managing director emeritus I.E. Block, the prize has now recognized a total of ten mathematical scientists for "distinguished contributions to the furtherance of applied mathematics on the national level." It has been awarded annually (except in 2007) since 2003.
Franco Brezzi, a professor of mathematical analysis at the Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori in Pavia, Italy, gave the 2009 John von Neumann Lecture at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Denver. Described by the prize committee as "one of the leading computational mathematicians of our day," Brezzi titled his lecture "Compatible Discretization of PDEs."
Brezzi's "insight, analysis, and exposition," in the words of the prize committee, "have had a profound impact on computational science and engineering. In particular, his work clarifying the nature of numerical stability and developing tools to devise stable finite element methods has been hugely influential. It has decisively advanced our ability to simulate a wide variety of physical phenomena, including incompressible fluids, flow in porous media, plate and shell structures, and electromagnetics."
Assyr Abdulle, chair of computational mathematics and numerical analysis at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique F�d�rale de Lausanne), is the 2009 recipient of the James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing. Abdulle was cited "for his outstanding contributions in a broad range of fields, including stability analysis and mathematical software for stiff initial value problems, efficient solution algorithms for stochastic differential equations, and error analysis of heterogeneous multiscale methods." His prize lecture was titled "Numerical Techniques for Stiff and Multiscale Differential Equations."
The Wilkinson Prize is awarded every four years for outstanding contributions by a young researcher during the six years preceding the award. Abdulle's predecessors are Emmanuel Cand�s (2005) and, moving back in time, Thomas Hou, Andrew Stuart, James Demmel, Paul Van Dooren, Charles Peskin, and Bjorn Engquist.
"For his extraordinary interdisciplinary contributions and for his exemplary record in mentoring students and postdocs," Weinan E of Princeton University received this year's Ralph E. Kleinman Prize.
E "has had profound impacts on research in stochastic partial differential equations and turbulence, numerical solution of multiscale problems, dynamics of interacting dislocations, liquid crystals and polymers, metastability, protein folding, gas dynamics, epitaxial growth, micromagnetics, and superconductivity," according to the prize citation. "His vision and breadth are truly remarkable."
The Kleinman prize has been awarded every other year since 1999; Robert Kohn, the first recipient, was followed by William Symes, Graeme Milton, Stanley Osher, and Salvatore Torquato.
SIAM Prizes Showcase Excellence at the 2009 Annual Meeting
SIAM honored the following prize recipients and distinguished lecturers at the prize lunch held in July during the 2009 SIAM Annual Meeting.
I.E. Block Community Lecture: Andrew W. Lo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ralph E. Kleinman Prize: Weinan E, Princeton University
AWM�SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture: Andrea Bertozzi, University of California, Los Angeles
W.T. and Idalia Reid Prize: Anders Lindquist, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
SIAM Award in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling:
Christopher Chang, Zhou Fan, and Yi Sun (Clifford H. Taubes, Faculty Adviser), Harvard University, "A Simulation-Based Assessment of Traffic Circle Control," Problem A, The Continuous Problem: "Designing a Traffic Circle"
Stephen Foster, Bob Potter, and Tommy Rogers (Richard Denman, Faculty Adviser), Southwestern University, "America's New Calling," Problem B, The Discrete Problem: "Energy and the Cell Phone"
SIAM Student Paper Prizes:
Awad H. Al-Mohy (Co-Author, Nicholas J. Higham), University of Manchester, UK, "A New Scaling and Squaring Algorithm for the Matrix Exponential," in press, SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications
Jie Chen (Co-Author, Yousef Saad), University of Minnesota, "On the Tensor SVD and the Optimal Low Rank Orthogonal Approximation of Tensors," SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications, Vol. 30, No. 4 (2009)
Shun Zhang (Co-Author, Zhiqiang Cai), Purdue University, "Recovery-Based Error Estimator for Interface Problems: Conforming Linear Elements," SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, Vol. 47, No. 3 (2009)
SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession: J. Tinsley Oden, University of Texas, Austin
Theodore von K�rm�n Prize: Mary F. Wheeler, University of Texas, Austin
John von Neumann Lecture: Franco Brezzi, Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori, Pavia, and IMATI�CNR
James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing: Assyr Abdulle, Ecole Polytechnique F�d�rale de Lausanne, Switzerland
2009 SIAM Fellows; see fellows.siam.org for a complete list of the fellows in the inaugural class
SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory Prize: Rafal Goebel, Loyola University Chicago
SIAG/CST Best SICON Paper Prize: Yves Achdou, Universit� Paris Diderot�Paris VII, for "An Inverse Problem for a Parabolic Variational Inequality with an Integro-Differential Operator," SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, Vol. 47, No. 2 (2008); Luc Bouten, California Institute of Technology, Ramon van Handel, Princeton University, and Matthew R. James, The Australian National University, for "An Introduction to Quantum Filtering," SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, Vol. 46, No. 6 (2007)
