2010 SIAM Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, July 12�16
September 15, 2010
Just about everyone who attends the SIAM Annual Meeting turns out for the prize luncheon, a festive celebration of outstanding work at a variety of levels and in many different areas. Among those honored at this year's luncheon were Bernd Sturmfels (left) of the University of California, Berkeley, who gave this year's John von Neumann Lecture. Sturmfels, who titled his lecture "Algebra: From Linear to Non-Linear," was cited by the prize committee "for his key role in developing and applying algebraic and algebraic�geometric ideas to problems arising in biology, statistics, optimization, and the numerical computation of polynomial systems."
Recognized for contributions of a completely different nature was Martin Gr�tschel (pictured at right), the 2010 recipient of the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession. Gr�tschel, vice president of ZIB (the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum f�r Informationstechnik Berlin) and a professor at the Technische Universit�t Berlin, received the prize "in recognition of his visionary, indefatigable, global leadership in application-driven mathematics research. The most concrete realization of his vision of mathematics as an indispensable ingredient in technological progress is the Berlin institute MATHEON, which he founded in 2002, and which, as director for its first seven years, he guided to a new, internationally recognized model of a mathematics research center." Gr�tschel's contributions include invited addresses at many meetings, as well as articles for SIAM News (on MATHEON and on applications of combinatorial optimization, which is among his research interests). He is the current secretary of the International Mathematical Union.
