SIAG/LA Prize Awarded at Snowbird
March 8, 1998
The SIAG/LA Prize is "first and foremost, a very effective way to encourage people to conduct important research in the area of linear algebra and its applications," says Ming Gu (right), who is shown here with Biswa Datta accepting the prize he received with co-author Stanley Eisenstat. "On a personal level, the prize assures me that people recognize my work in the area and encourages me to do more in the future."
Ming Gu (University of California at Los Angeles) and Stanley Eisenstat (Yale University) were recognized for their paper "A Divide-and-Conquer Algorithm for the Symmetric Tridiagonal Eigenproblem," and Gerard Sleijpen and Henk van der Vorst (Mathematics Institute, University of Utrecht) were honored for their paper "A Jacobi-Davidson Iteration Method for Linear Eigenvalue Problems." SIAG/LA also awarded an honorable mention to L. Qui (Hong Kong University of Science), B. Bernhardsson and A. Rantzer (Lund, Sweden), E.J. Davison (University of Toronto), P.M. Young (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and J.C. Doyle (California Institute of Technology), for a paper titled "A Formula for Computation of the Real Stability Radius."
Henk van der Vorst (right) accepts the SIAG/LA Prize from Biswa Datta at the Sixth SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra. "Everyone hopes that success is on the horizon," says van der Vorst, who shared the prize with his co-author Gerard Sleijpen. "I feel that I have really touched that horizon by receiving this prestigous prize. It is a great feeling, with much more impact than I ever anticipated. "However, the prize does more than give a firm pat on the back; it indicates that research on eigenvalue problems is seen as highly relevant. This area is in the center of interest again, and this prize is regarded as very positive encouragement, adding status and prestige to such research, by our colleagues in this field. "I got many personal reactions that confirmed my impression that numerical linear algebra is not only a very relevant research area, but that it is also filled with nice people who have a truly positive competitive spirit."
The SIAG/LA prize is awarded triennially at the SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra, the only all-SIAG/LA meeting; the first prize was awarded in 1988. More information about the prize is available at http://www.siam.org/prizes/sponsored/siagla.php.
Posters by mathematicians from Germany (left) and the U.S. received special recognition from conference organizers.
SIAG/LA also awarded special recognition to two of the conference's many posters: "On the Perturbation Theory for the Unitary Eigenvalue Problem," prepared by B. Bohnhorst (Schmidt, Vogel und Partner, Gesellschaft f�r Organisation und Management Beratung mbH, Germany), and A. Bunse-Gerstner and Heike Fassbender (Universit�t Bremen, Germany); and "Application of a Semi-Discrete Matrix Decomposition," presented by Tamara G. Kolda (Oak Ridge National Laboratories) and Dianne P. O'Leary (University of Maryland, College Park).
