Awarded to James Albert Sethian (Berkeley, USA).
The Pioneer Prize was established for pioneering work introducing applied mathematical methods and scientific computing techniques to an industrial problem area or a new scientific field of applications. It was created on the initiative of SIAM, and was first awarded in 1999. Carrying a cash award of USD 1000, the Pioneer Prize is presently funded by SIAM.
James Albert Sethian of the University of California Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory receives the 2011 ICIAM Pioneer Prize for his fundamental methods and algorithms which have had a large impact in applications such as in imaging and shape recovery in medicine, geophysics and tomography and drop dynamics in inkjets.
James Albert Sethian is a professor of mathematics at the University of California Berkeley and a member of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was born on 10 May 1954. He received the B.A. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1976 and earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California Berkeley in 1982. Sethian has done pioneering work in applied mathematics. He introduced with Andrew Majda a widely used asymptotic analysis of combustion. The level set method pioneered by Sethian and S.Osher has had a very major impact on many fields of application, and is one of the most widely used new algorithms of the past few decades. Sethian's algorithms for imaging and shape recovery in medical scanning devices are imbedded in current medical imaging workstations. He developed tools for solving Hamilton–Jacobi equations with applications in geophysics and tomography, including problems with multiple arrivals. Sethian has created startlingly accurate numerical methods of drop dynamics for use with inkjets. This extraordinary range of successes is made possible by Sethian's unparalleled eagerness to learn thoroughly the engineering aspects of problems he works on, the accuracy and depth of his feelings for mathematical structure, and his broad mathematical knowledge. His body of work is emblematic of what an applied mathematician should aspire to achieve.
Subcommittee for the 2011 ICIAM Pioneer Prize
- Björn Engquist (U Texas, USA), chair;
- Nicola Bellomo (Torino, Italy);
- Jon Chapman (Oxford);
- Hermano Frid (IMPA, Brazil);
- Ruppert Klein (FU Berlin);
- Shige Peng (Shandong, PR China);
- Linda Petzold (UC Santa Barbara, USA).