SIAM Prizes, Chicago, 2014 Annual Meeting

“For his fundamental contributions in partial differential equations, deterministic as well as stochastic, including applications in filtering, stochastic and impulsive control, optimal stopping, variational inequalities and mean field game theory,” Alain Bensoussan received this year’s W.T. and Idalia Reid Prize. He currently divides his time between the University of Texas, Dallas, and City University of Hong Kong. A longtime member of the faculty of the University of Paris Dauphine, Bensoussan was president of INRIA from 1984 to 1996, followed by a term as president of the Centre National d´Etudes Spatiales (until 2003); he chaired the council of the European Space Agency from 1999 to 2002. He gave a Reid Prize lecture titled “On the Master Equation in Mean Field Theory” in Chicago.

Given to a junior scientist in recognition of outstanding research in applied mathematics, the biannual Richard C. DiPrima Prize was awarded in Chicago to Thomas Trogdon, an NSF postdoctoral fellow at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Selection is based on candidates’ doctoral dissertations. Trogdon, who received a PhD in 2013 from the University of Washington, wrote his dissertation, “Riemann–Hilbert Problems, Their Solution and the Computation of Nonlinear Special Functions,” under the supervision of Bernard Deconinck. Trogdon’s dissertation, according to the prize committee, “made outstanding contributions to the theory of and numerical methods for Riemann–Hilbert problems and their application to integrable systems, nonlinear partial differential equations, including the KdV and nonlinear Schrödinger equations, and special functions.”

Given every four years since 2002, the Julian Cole Lectureship was awarded in 2014 to John Lowengrub of the University of California, Irvine. The prize committee cited his “seminal contributions to fluid dynamics, materials science, and computational biology through the development of mathematical models, computational methods, and numerical simulations of free-boundary problems and tumor growth.” Lowengrub’s prize lecture was titled “Growth, Patterning, and Control in Nonequilibrium Systems.”

Irene Gamba (center) of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin gave the 2014 AWM–SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Chicago. Gamba, shown here with AWM president Ruth Charney and SIAM president Irene Fonseca, titled her lecture “The Evolution of Complex Interactions in Non-Linear Kinetic Systems.” Honored “for her significant contributions to analytical and numerical methods for statistical transport problems in complex particle systems,” she was also cited for her outstanding record of service to the applied mathematics community.