Awarded to Professor Martin D. Kruskal, Rutgers University, for discovering the particle-like behaviour of solitary waves, which he named `solitons'; for introducing the inverse scattering transform method of solving the initial-value problem for the KdV equation; and for many other contributions to applied mathematics.
Martin David Kruskal was born in New York in 1925. He did his first degree at the University of Chicago and obtained his PhD from New York University in 1952. He then moved to Princeton, first to Physics and later to Mathematics. Since 1989 he has held the David Hilbert Chair of Mathematics at Rutgers University.
Martin Kruskal is most famous for the invention of the inverse scattering transform method. The key discovery was the particle-like behaviour of solitary wave solutions of the Korteweg de Vries equation; Kruskal named these waves `solitons' and showed how they could be used to solve initial value problems for a whole class of nonlinear partial differential equations. This work has led to a host of further developments by Kruskal and others and has transformed the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations. Kruskal has also done seminal work in plasma physics and astrophysics; in particular he has shown that the singularity of the Schwarzschild solution of Einstein's equations of general relativity is not an actual singularity of the geometry but is an apparent singularity due to the coordinate system. More recently he has returned to pure mathematics and the study of surreal numbers.
Professor Nalini Joshi accepted the prize on behalf of Martin Kruskal.
Subcommittee for the 2003 ICIAM Maxwell Prize
- Karl-Heinz Hoffmann;
- Joseph Keller;
- Hilary Ockendon (chair);
- Philip G Saffman;
- Ian Sloan;
- Yongji Tan.