Awarded to Yvon Maday (Sorbonne University, Paris, France) in recognition of his leading role in the introduction of powerful methods for numerical simulation, such as spectral methods, reduced order modeling, domain decomposition, models and simulation in medical sciences, fluid-structure interaction, and ab-initio chemistry. Several of his works helped in the launching of start-ups and are intensively used in industry.
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 5000, the Pioneer Prize is presently funded by SIAM.
Yvon Maday was born in Saint Brieuc (Bretagne/France) in 1957. He graduated at Université Pierre et Marie Curie as a student of École Normale Supérieure de Saint Cloud. He became a Doctor of Mathematical Sciences (thèse d'état) from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) in 1986. After becoming assistant professor at Université of Creteil in 1981, he spent 18 months as a visiting professor at Brown University and MIT before getting a position of full professor at Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 1989. He has also been a visiting professor at the Division of Applied Math at Brown University for 15 years.
Yvon Maday is currently professor at Sorbonne University, Paris, and also holds a chair at Brown University, USA. He has held several important responsibilities, including dean of the school of mathematics at UPMC, chair of the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions, and president of the French Applied Mathematical Society (SMAI). At the same time, thanks to his rare energy and talent, he has developed a very substantial and integrated research program on a large variety of topics, such as spectral methods, reduced order modeling, domain decomposition, models and simulation in medical sciences, fluid-structure interaction, and ab-initio chemistry. He has supervised more than 40 PhD students and written more than 180 papers in highly ranked journals, as well as 6 books.
Yvon Maday was an invited lecturer at ICM 2006 in Madrid, he was elected to the European Academy of Sciences in 2003, and appointed as a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France in 2012. The Jacques-Louis Lions prize was awarded to him by the French Academy of Sciences in 2009.
He has frequent interactions with engineers, chemists and biologists, and with industry. His interests in interdisciplinary and industrial research have led him to build the successful CEMRACS summer schools held every year at the CIRM conference center in Marseille, France. In 2017, he founded the Carnot institute SMILES which aims to promote collaboration between academic and industrial research in the areas of modeling, simulation, optimization and data sciences.
Jointly with Anthony Patera, Yvon Maday introduced and analyzed the Legendre spectral element method, in particular for fluid models such as Stokes and Navier-Stokes. This led to the Nek5000 Navier-Stokes code of Paul Fischer that is widely used to simulate turbulence on massively parallel machines.
In collaboration with Christine Bernardi, Yvon Maday introduced the Mortar element method which has became quite prominent in parallel computing and has been applied extensively in a wide range of disciplines including fluid dynamics, electromagnetism and contact mechanics.
Jointly with Jacques-Louis Lions and Gabriel Turinici, Yvon Maday developed domain decomposition methods in the time variable for evolution problems. These techniques, known as parareal discretizations, result in dramatic gains of CPU time when compared to standard evolution schemes.
Together with Anthony Patera, he developed and analyzed several model order reduction techniques for parametrized problems, in particular the Reduced Basis method, as well as the Reduced Basis Element method which integrates local model order reduction within a general domain decomposition framework. Closely related is the empirical interpolation method (EIM) which aims at treating efficiently general types of parameter dependence and various nonlinear problems. The EIM method is remarkably original in both formulation and analysis, essentially an interpolation framework tailored to a particular manifold, and has given rise to many related hyperreduction techniques.
The numerical methods developed and analyzed by Yvon Maday have always been driven by their ability to treat concrete applications, which led him naturally to interact with other disciplines. In mathematical medicine, the mortar method was used in the development of numerical fluid-structure coupling for the analysis of blood flow in the heart, and the reduced basis element method was employed in breathing simulation in order to manage the complex geometry of the lung. In quantum chemistry, the domain decomposition methods were used to reduce dramatically the computational time in the simulation of continuum solvation.
Subcommittee for the 2019 ICIAM Pioneer Prize
- Denis Talay (INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, France), Chair;
- Luca Formaggia (Politecnico di Milano, Italy);
- Alain Goriely (University of Oxford, UK);
- Dorit S. Hochbaum (University of California at Berkeley, USA);
- Barbara Kaltenbacher (University of Klagenfurt, Austria);
- Carlos Vázquez (Universidade da Coruña, Spain).