Awarded to Emmanuel Candès (Stanford & Pasadena, USA).
Emmanuel J. Candès of Stanford University and of the California Institute of Technology is awarded the 2011 ICIAM Collatz Prize in recognition of his outstanding contributions to numerical solution of wave propagation problems and compressive sensing, as well as anisotropic extensions of wavelets.
Emmanuel Candès is a professor on mathematics and statistics at Stanford University, on leave from the department of Applied and Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He was born in 1970 in Paris, France. He received his diploma as an engineer from the École Polytechnique France in 1993 and the M.Sc. in applied mathematics from the Universities Paris VI and Paris IX in 1994. In 1998 he earned the Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Emmanuel Candès has accomplished various deep and brilliant mathematical works. First, in joint work with L.Demanet, he proposed and mathematically justified the first linear complexity method for the fast numerical solution of wave propagation problems. The analysis involved the proof that, within a curvelet representation, the propagation operator for the associated evolution problem is approximately equivalent to a permutation matrix, and that the compressed representation of the operator can be computed in O(N) operations. The significance of this result is only now beginning to be explored.
Then, in compressive sensing, together with David Donoho, Justin Romberg and Terence Tao, he developed a spectacular advance based on harmonic analysis, approximation theory and optimization. This result has been widely applied to image processing, sensor design, control and many other fields.
He identified the fundamental role of the restricted isometry property (RIP) in compressive sensing. He has also a major contribution to anisotropic extensions of wavelets, which has deeply advanced both applications and mathematical theory. In fact, concepts such as ridgelets, curvelets, chirplets and so on, are his inventions.
His work is highly innovative and shows off well his mathematically sophisticated talent. We are confident that it impacts widely-ranged fields of application. It should also be mentioned that he has served as the Ph.D. or the postdoctoral advisor for a number of excellent young mathematicians and that he himself performs as an important leader of scientific research.
Subcommittee for the 2011 ICIAM Collatz Prize
- Tom Mitsui (Nagoya, Japan), chair;
- Adi Adimurthi (Bangalore, India);
- Douglas N. Arnold (Minnesota, USA);
- Jean-Pierre Bourguignon (IHES, France);
- Wolfgang Hackbusch (MPI Leipzig, Germany);
- Anders Lindquist (KTH Stockholm, Sweden).