Engquist receives 2015 ICIAM Pioneer Prize

ICES Professor Bjorn Engquist has been awarded the 2015 International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) Pioneer Prize for fundamental contributions in the field of applied mathematics, numerical analysis and scientific computing which have had long lasting impact in the field as well as successful applications in science, engineering and industry.

Engquist is a professor of mathematics.

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 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and was first awarded in 1999. Carrying a cash award of $5,000, the Pioneer Prize is presently funded by SIAM.

Engquist earned his Ph.D. from Uppsala University in1975. He has been professor of mathematics at UCLA, and the Michael Henry Stater University Professor of Mathematics and Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. He was director of the Research Institute for Industrial Applications of Scientific Computing and of the Centre for Parallel Computers at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

Engquist has made fundamental contributions in the field of applied mathematics, numerical analysis and scientific computing which have had a long-lasting impact in the field as well as successful applications in science, engineering, and industry. Some of his most important pioneering contributions include seminal work on absorbing boundary conditions (ABC), first proposed by Engquist and Majda, for numerical computation of wave propagation. These boundary conditions can be used at the boundary of the computational domain to reduce the artificial reflection of waves effectively. Owing to its simplicity and efficiency, it has been one of the most successful and widely used numerical techniques in the past 30 years and has had significant impact in practical applications such as geophysics, seismology, and the petroleum industry.

In a second direction, Engquist, with his collaborators, is responsible for the development and analysis of shock capturing methods for nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws, including the well-known essentially non-oscillatory (ENO) method. These numerical methods have been widely used in computational fluid dynamics, aerospace engineering, combustion and other applications.

For the past 20 years, Engquist has been a leader in the field of multiscale modeling and analysis, where his contributions include numerical homogenization, and the heterogeneous multiscale method (HMM), among other results.

Five major ICIAM Prizes will be presented at the next ICIAM Congress, ICIAM 2015, the Eighth International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, which will take place in Beijing, China, August 10-14, 2015.