Photos from San Diego, July 2013

Prize Luncheon at AN13.

Anette (Peko) Hosoi of MIT was the 2013 I.E. Block Community Lecturer.

Anette (Peko) Hosoi of MIT, the 2013 I.E. Block Community Lecturer, gave a model lecture: interesting topics (appropriately connected to MPE 2013) and accessible mathematics, all clearly conveyed with irresistible enthusiasm. The lecture, “From Razor Clams to Robots: The Mathematics Behind Biologically Inspired Design,” was followed by a lively community reception.

A lively community reception followed the 2013 I.E. Block Lecture.

Anna C. Gilbert of the University of Michigan received the 2013 Ralph E. Kleinman Prize for her “creative and deep contributions to the mathematics of signal processing, data analysis and communications.” Gilbert’s “bold and interdisciplinary work,” according to the prize committee, “combines techniques from computer science, harmonic analysis and probability in the best traditions of the Kleinman Prize.”

Honored in part for “his many contributions to serving and promoting applied mathematics” as director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota, Doug Arnold received the 2013 SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession at this year’s SIAM Annual Meeting. A former president of SIAM (2009–10) and currently an active member of the SIAM Committee on Science Policy, Arnold is the McKnight Presidential Professor of Mathematics at Minnesota. As readers who heard his past-president’s address (at the 2012 SIAM Annual Meeting) will know, he has directed much of his attention in recent years to troubling issues arising in scholarly publishing. Indeed, the prize committee commended him for taking “a leading role in discussions about citations and journal impact factors and in exposing unethical scholarly publishing behavior.” Arnold is the 13th recipient of the prize, which recognizes “distinguished contributions to the furtherance of applied mathematics on the national level”—a condition that he has easily satisfied at the international level as well. Despite the crowded agenda reflected by the prize citation, Arnold is an active researcher; his main current interest is finite element exterior calculus. His NSF/CBMS lectures on the subject, given at ICERM in June 2012, are slated to appear in the form of a SIAM book.

Margaret Cheney (right) of Colorado State University and the Naval Postgraduate School, pictured here with AWM past president Jill Pipher, titled her 2013 AWM–SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture “An Introduction to Radar Imaging.” According to the selection committee, Cheney has spearheaded “a broad line of research that is coupling disparate radar solutions in ways previously unrecognized. Her application of Microlocal Analysis to high-frequency radar scattering—a method largely unknown to the radar community—has proven to be especially relevant to the problems of radar target detection, tracking, and imaging. Using these tools, she has shown how the essential behavior of a wide variety of radar scattering scenarios can be isolated from secondary phenomena.” Cheney’s unconventional approach has led to solutions to several longstanding problems in radar imaging that heretofore defied complete analysis, the committee concluded. She “has demonstrated how a class of important issues in modern radar can finally be addressed.”