Funded by SIAM, the ICIAM Pioneer Prize is for pioneering work introducing applied mathematical methods and scientific computing techniques to an industrial problem area or a new scientific field of applications. The prize commemorates the spirit and impact of the American pioneers.
The ICIAM Pioneer Prize for 2003 was awarded to Professor Stanley Osher, University of California, Los Angeles, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to applied mathematics and computational science — particularly his work on shock-capturing schemes, PDE-based image processing, and the level-set method.
Professor Osher's work on shock-capturing schemes for conservation laws has been extremely influential in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In the late 1970s and early 1980s he developed, with various collaborators, monotone and total-variation-decreasing (TVD) schemes which quickly became very popular. Later, with collaborators, he introduced essentially-non-oscillatory (ENO) schemes, which have found widespread use in compressible CFD. Further developments include WENO schemes, and shock-capturing methods for solving Hamilton-Jacobi equations. Osher's work with L. Rudin on total-variation- based image restoration was among the first applications of PDE methods to image processing. This work has been very influential, stimulating mathematical research on PDE-based image analysis, and leading to the development of related methods for various inverse problems. It has also had commercial success through the activities of Cognitech, a company founded by Osher and Rudin.
His work on level-set methods represents a fresh, very powerful approach to the numerical solution of evolutionary free-boundary problems. In the late 80s, with J. Sethian, Osher addressed the propagation of codimension-one fronts with curvature-dependent speed. Since then, with various collaborators, he has addressed a wide variety of related problems, developing techniques for handling nonlocal velocity laws, triple junctions, and higher-codimension sets. He has, moreover, demonstrated the value of these techniques by applying them to problems from materials science, geometry, and fluid dynamics.
This Pioneer Prize recognizes Professor Osher for his many deep and novel mathematical contributions, which have had remarkable impact on computational science.
Subcommittee for the 2003 ICIAM Pioneer Prize
- Ronald Coifman;
- Doina Cioranescu;
- Robert V. Kohn (chair);
- Linda Petzold;
- Gennadi Vainikko;
- Shmuel Winograd;
- Yoshikazu Giga.