Awarded to George Papanicolaou for his brilliant use of mathematics to solve important problems in science and engineering; in particular, problems involving inhomogeneity, wave propagation, random media, diffusion, scattering, focusing, imaging, and finance.
The Lagrange Prize was established to provide international recognition to individual mathematicians who have made an exceptional contribution to applied mathematics throughout their careers. It was created on the initiative of SEMA, SIMAI and SMAI and first awarded in 1999. Carrying a cash award of USD 5000, the Lagrange Prize is presently funded by the four member societies SBMAC, SEMA, SIMAI and SMAI.
George Papanicolaou is the Robert Grimmett Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University. He received his B.E.E. degree from Union College in Schenectady, NY, in 1965, and his M.S. in 1967 and Ph.D in 1969 from the Courant Institute of New York University. He was a member of the faculty of the Courant Institute during the years 1969-1993, and moved to the department of mathematics at Stanford in 1993. He has been awarded a Sloan Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, received the von Neumann prize of the AMS and SIAM, and delivered the Josiah Willard Gibbs lecture of the American Mathematical Society. He is a SIAM Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
George Papanicolaou has devoted his long and productive career to the analysis and prediction of the many phenomena in the world around us that involve multiple scales and are best viewed as random. The tools he developed include some that are rooted in "pure" analysis and probability theory, combined with asymptotics and computation. Though the specific applications are many and diverse, the body of his work constitutes a coherent and broadly applicable whole.
In particular, his work on waves in random media and on the multiscale analysis of stochastic systems culminated in the celebrated book (with A. Bensoussan and J.-L. Lions) "Asymptotic Analysis of Periodic Structures" that has had a huge impact on the development of homogenization methods. He performed a remarkable analysis of the universal focusing singularity of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, and pioneered the mathematical theory of time reversal for waves in random and heterogenous media. He has made important contributions to financial mathematics, in particular to the understanding of volatility and risk assessment. He contributed to the development of imaging methods, such as synthetic aperture radar and passive sensor imaging with ambient noise. He has made important contributions to the analysis of scattering and of diffusion, including turbulent diffusion.
Subcommittee for the ICIAM 2019 Lagrange Prize
- Alexandre Chorin (University of California at Berkeley, USA), Chair;
- Marsha Berger (New York University, USA);
- Lei Guo (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China);
- Laure Saint-Raymond (Ecole Normale de Lyon, France);
- Christof Schütte (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany);
- Simon Tavaré (University of Cambridge, UK).