Awarded to Leslie Greengard (Courant Institute, New York University and Flatiron Institute, Simons Foundation) for his pioneering work on fast algorithms including the fast multipole method (one of the top-ten algorithms of the 20th century), fast Gauss transform, and fast direct solvers; and for the development of innovative high-order, automatically adaptive algorithms for differential and integral equations.
Leslie Greengard was born in London, England, but grew up in the United States in New York City, Boston, and New Haven. He holds a B.A. in mathematics from Wesleyan University (1979), an M.D, from the Yale University School of Medicine (1987), and a Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University (1987).
From 2006-2011, Greengard was director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, an independent division of the New York University (NYU) and is currently a professor of mathematics and computer science at this prestigious Center. He is also director of the Center for Computational Mathematics at the Flatiron Institute, a division of the Simons Foundation. He formerly served as the director at the Center for Computational Biology in the Flatiron Institute.
Professor Greengard has had a profound impact on computational mathematics. The Fast Multipole Method (FMM), developed together with Vladimir Rokhlin, is one of the top ten algorithms of the 20th century. Its impact has been further enhanced by complementary techniques such as
- Fast Gauss transforms for the rapid computation of Gauss convolution over unstructured point sets;
- Fast algorithms and implementations for three types of non-uniform Fourier transforms;
- Fast direct solvers for non-oscillatory and oscillatory integral equations based on the idea of recursive skeletonization.
These contributions have enabled simulations that would otherwise be completely intractable in áreas such as electromagnetics, acoustics, computational biology, fluid and solid mechanics, heat transfer, quantum mechanics, and biomedical imaging.
Besides its immediate impact for solving fast summation problems that arise directly in computational simulations, the other dramatic impact of the FMM was that it unlocked integral equation formulations as a tool for mathematical modeling of large scale problems. Leslie has spearheaded a decades long effort to extend integral equations techniques to apply to not only elliptic problems, but also parabolic ones like the heat equation, or the Navier-Stokes equations.
Professor Greengard is a prolific writer with more than 120 professional articles. Many of these articles are highly cited and some of his review articles have strongly influenced the field of applied and computational mathematics.
He was an invited speaker for the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 1998 and an invited speaker for the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) in 1999. He gave the prestigious von Neumann Lecture of SIAM in 2014. He has been elected to National Academy of Sciences (USA), National Academy of Engineering (USA), and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Subcommittee for the 2023 ICIAM Pioneer Prize
- Alfredo Bermudez (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain), Chair;
- Poul G. Hjorth (Technic University of Denmark, Denmark);
- Narayan Rangaraj (India, IIT Bombay);
- Carola Bibiane Schönlieb (University of Cambridge, UK);
- Jin Keun Seo (Yonsei University, South Korea);
- Joseph Teran (UC Davis, US).