Prizes and Awards
President awards medals for science, technology and innovation
President Obama presented the 2011 National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology and Innovation on Friday. The highest awards given to scientists, engineers and inventors by the federal government, they were bestowed to twelve researchers in a ceremony in the White House East Room.
Mathematicians Solomon Golomb and Barry Mazur were among the recipients. Solomon Golomb is a SIAM member.
You can view a complete transcript and a video of President Obama’s remarks, along with award citations here.
Call for Nominations for ICIAM Prizes
The ICIAM Prize Committee for 2015 calls for nominations for the five ICIAM Prizes to be awarded in 2015. All ICIAM prizes are international, and each prize has its own special character. Nominations are therefore welcomed from all over the world, and are due 31 October 2013. Read the rest of this entry »
American mathematicians win prestigious Wolf Prize
Seven scientists from America, Germany and Austria as well as an architect from Portugal are recipients of Israel’s prestigious Wolf Prize, announced in Tel Aviv Wednesday.
Wolf winners are considered strong contenders for Nobel prizes, with about one in three laureates in chemistry, physics and medicine going on to receive the Nobel in the more than three decades that the Wolf Foundation has granted the awards.
The two prizes in mathematics went to Americans George D. Mostow and Michael Artin. Michael Artin is a SIAM member and Emeritus Professor at MIT.
You can find more details about the award and other prize recipients here.
A million-dollar algorithm challenge from the DTRA
The US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) is sponsoring an algorithm challenge at Innocentive, the website that crowdsources innovative problems, with a $1 million prize purse.
The challenge is to design an algorithm that takes raw DNA sequence data from a complex, possibly limited, diagnostic sample, characterize the quality of the sample, and provide a DNA analysis.
The algorithm should be able to provide an accurate analysis, be implementable in a low to moderate resource computational environment, be fast, and not require a human expert.
For details visit the challenge page.
SIAM John von Neumann Lecture awarded to John Ball
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) awarded the 2012 John von Neumann Lecture to Sir John Ball of the University of Oxford in recognition of his deep contributions to our understanding of the mechanics of materials via the calculus of variations and other branches of mathematical analysis.
The citation especially notes his pioneering work on existence theorems and constitutive models for nonlinear elasticity, cavitation in solids, irregular minimizers and material microstructure, and, more recently, defects in liquid crystals.
The John von Neumann Lecture is awarded each year by SIAM to a mathematician or scientist for outstanding contributions to the field of applied mathematical sciences and their effective communication to the community. Established in 1959, SIAM’s flagship lecture is given in honor of the Hungarian-American mathematician after whom it is named, and whose pioneering research encompassed the fields of mathematics, physics, economics, computer science, and statistics.
Professor Ball accepted the prestigious award from SIAM President Nick Trefethen at the Prizes and Awards Luncheon, following which, he delivered The John von Neumann Lecture, Liquid Crystals for Mathematicians, on Tuesday, July 10, at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
An important and versatile interface for electronic visual displays in a wide range of equipment from calculators to television screens, liquid crystals are the working substance behind a multi-billion dollar industry. Representing a class of soft matter systems that exhibit properties intermediate to solid crystals and isotropic fluids, they present an intriguing subject for mathematical analysis. In a very engaging lecture, Dr. Ball described various branches of mathematics, including partial differential equations, the calculus of variations, multiscale analysis, scientific computation, dynamical systems, algebra and topology, that can explain the math behind liquid crystals. Watch a brief video recapping his prize lecture:
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Barbara Keyfitz receives awards for research and service in applied mathematics
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) awards the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession to an applied mathematician who has made noteworthy contributions to the furtherance of applied mathematics on the national level. The 2012 award goes to Barbara Lee Keyfitz of The Ohio State University.
Professor Keyfitz is a fitting recipient of the prize, as evidenced by her long-term and pervasive advocacy of applied mathematics in a career spanning several leadership roles. As the Director of the Fields Institute in Toronto (2004-2008), Keyfitz revitalized applied mathematics programming with initiatives such as the successful Fields-MITACS Industrial Problem-Solving workshops. An innovative graduate industrial research internship program was created for students all over Canada during her term on the Board of Directors of MITACS-NCE (Network of Centres of Excellence), a program that has since expanded to cover all disciplines. Closer links between SIAM’s US and Mexican communities are owed in part to Keyfitz’s efforts in organizing numerous SIAM-SMM (Mexican Mathematical Society) conferences. She has served as President of the Association for Women in Mathematics (2005-2006), as SIAM Vice President for Programs (1998-2003), and is currently the President of ICIAM.
If her contributions to the field need any reinforcing, Professor Keyfitz also received this year’s AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture for her pioneering and seminal contributions to the field of hyperbolic conservation laws. In collaboration with Herbert Kranzer, she introduced the novel and important notion of singular shocks and made the original study of their properties. Her research group also spearheaded the revival of the rigorous treatment of transonic gas flow, now a very active research area. Important applications of her work include aerodynamics and multiphase flow models in porous media. The AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture is awarded annually at the SIAM Annual Meeting to highlight significant contributions of women to applied or computational mathematics.
The Dr. Charles Saltzer Professor of Mathematics at the Ohio State University, Dr. Keyfitz was recognized for her contributions at the SIAM Annual Meeting held in Minneapolis, Minnesota from July 9-13. Dr. Keyfitz delivered the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture, The Role of Characteristics in Conservation Laws, on Monday afternoon and accepted her awards the following day at the Prizes and Awards Luncheon. Watch a brief video recapping her prize lecture:
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Six outstanding students receive SIAM prizes for math and computing research
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)’s Student Paper Competition selects the best paper submissions each year to recognize noteworthy research work and scholarship by students in applied mathematics and computing. The awards are made based solely on the merit and content of student contributions to the submitted papers. Winners of the SIAM Student Paper Prize are awarded a cash prize of $1000 each, a SIAM Student Travel Award, and a framed, hand-calligraphed certificate.
The 2011 prizes were awarded to Necdet Serhat Aybat (Pennsylvania State University, USA) for the paper, “Unified Approach for Minimizing Composite Norms;” Sungwoo Park (Knight Capital Group, USA) for “Portfolio Selection Using Tikhonov Filtering to Estimate the Covariance Matrix;” and Xiangxiong Zhang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) for a paper titled “On Maximum-Principle-Satisfying High Order Schemes for Scalar Conservation Laws.”
The 2012 prizes were awarded to Brittany D. Froese (Simon Fraser University, Canada) for “Convergent Finite Difference Solvers for Viscosity Solutions of the Elliptic Monge-Ampère Equation in Dimensions Two and Higher;” Stefanie Hollborn (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany) for the paper, “Reconstructions from Backscatter Data in Electric Impedance Tomography;” and Marina Moraiti (University of Pittsburgh, USA) for “On the Quasistatic Approximation in the Stokes-Darcy Model of Groundwater-Surface Water Flows.”
The prize recipients were in attendance to receive their awards at the Prizes and Awards Luncheon held Tuesday, July 10, and presented their winning papers in a Student Days session the following evening as part of the SIAM Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
For abstracts and more details on the papers, please visit the SIAM Student Paper Prize presentations page.
SIAM awards undergraduates for exemplary mathematical modeling
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) gives the SIAM Award in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) to two undergraduate teams judged “outstanding” among hundreds of participants worldwide in the annual MCM administered by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP).
The contest inspires students to develop solutions involving mathematical modeling to open-ended problems in two categories: continuous and discrete. SIAM judges pick a winner in each of the two categories among teams determined “outstanding” by COMAP judging.
Both 2011 and 2012 recipients were awarded prizes at the Prizes and Awards Luncheon held on Tuesday, July 10, at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Enhao Gong, Rongsha Li, and Xiaoyun Wang of Beijing’s Tsinghua University, mentored by their faculty advisor, Jimin Zhang, were winners of the 2011 Continuous Problem “Snowboard Course.” Li was present to accept the award from SIAM President Nick Trefethen.
The award for the 2011 Discrete Problem, “Repeater Coordination,” went to California’s Harvey Mudd College students Daniel Furlong, Dylan Marriner, and Louis Ryan. Their faculty advisor was Susan Martonosi. Ryan accepted the award on behalf of his team.
The award for the 2012 Continuous Problem, entitled “The Leaves of a Tree,” went to the team from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. Team members Cheng Fu, Hangqi Zhao, Danting Zhu received their awards at the luncheon. Their advisor for the contest was Zhiyi Tan.
The Discrete Problem for 2012 was titled “Camping Along the Big Long River.” University of Louisville students James Jones, Suraj Kannan, and Joshua Mitchell nabbed the SIAM award in this category. They were coached by Changbing Hu. Kannan and Mitchell received the award for the team.
Winners presented their papers in a session of Student Days on Wednesday, July 11.
Student recipients each received a cash award of $300, a SIAM Student Travel Award, complimentary SIAM membership for three years, and a framed, hand-calligraphed certificate for their schools.
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Sergey Nadtochiy of Oxford University is the 2012 SIAG/FME Junior Scientist Prize recipient
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Activity Group on Financial Mathematics and Engineering (SIAG/FME) awards its Junior Scientist Prize to an outstanding junior researcher for distinguished contributions to the mathematical modeling of financial markets. Established in 2010, the prize gives awardees a hand-calligraphed certificate and a plaque.
Sergey Nadtochiy of Oxford University has been awarded the 2012 prize for his impressive contributions to mathematical finance and his original, sophisticated, and rigorous mathematical analysis of challenging problems in volatility modeling and derivative pricing theory.
Nadtochiy delivered the associated prize lecture, Market-Based Approach to Modeling Derivatives Prices on the morning of Tuesday, July 10, and accepted the prize at the Prizes and Awards Luncheon that followed, at the SIAM Annual Meeting held in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
He is a senior postdoctoral research fellow at the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance and the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford. He earned a Specialist (MSc) Degree in mathematics from Moscow State University, in addition to an MA and PhD in Operations Research and Financial Engineering from Princeton University.
His research interests are in the areas of market-based models for derivatives prices; optimal investment; static hedging; inverse problems; stochastic analysis; and PDE.
Stanford mathematician Thomas Goldstein receives SIAM Richard C. DiPrima Prize
Thomas A. Goldstein of Stanford University is the recipient of the 2012 Richard C. DiPrima Prize awarded by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Goldstein is being recognized for his doctoral dissertation, “Algorithms and Applications for L1 Minimization,” and for devising an algorithm, the split Bregman iteration, which is remarkably effective for L1 minimization, in particular, to applications in compressed sensing and total variation-based image processing.
A postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, Goldstein works in the Information Systems Laboratory in the Department of Electrical Engineering. He obtained his BA in Mathematics from Washington University in St.Louis and earned an MS and PhD both in Applied Mathematics from UCLA, under the supervision of Stanley Osher.
Their joint paper, “The Split-Bregman Method for L-1 Regularized Problems,” published in the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences in 2009 was selected by Thomson Reuters as a “new hot paper” in computer science based on Essential Science IndicatorsSM.
Goldstein’s primary research interest is in numerical methods for optimization problems and elliptic PDEs. His work finds many applications in image processing, especially in MRI and CT technology.
He received his prize, which includes $1,000 and a framed, hand-calligraphed certificate, at the Prizes and Awards Luncheon held on Tuesday, July 10, as part of the SIAM Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The Richard C. DiPrima Prize is awarded every two years to a junior scientist in recognition of outstanding research in applied mathematics. The prize is based on the candidate’s dissertation, which must have been completed within the two calendar years prior to the year before the award date.
The prize was proposed in 1986 by the late Gene H. Golub, when he was SIAM President, to honor then-late Past President Richard C. DiPrima. The prize is funded by donations from friends, students, colleagues, and family members of Dr. DiPrima.