Tower lit for AMS, Wolf Prize Awardees

[[The tower was lit Jan. 24 to honor three ICES faculty who received major international awards.

Mathematician and ICES faculty member Luis Caffarelli received Israel’s prestigious Wolf Prize.

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) has awarded two of its highest honors to ICES faculty Ivo M. Babuska and Bjorn Engquist.

The AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement was awarded to ICES Senior Scientist Babuska. The 2012 George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics--a joint honor from AMS and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics--was awarded to Mathematics Professor Engquist who directs the ICES Center for Numerical Analysis. Read more.]]

Each year the Wolf Foundation awards $100,000 in up to six fields. Caffarelli shares the 2012 prize with Michael Aschbacher, professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. Caffarelli is professor of mathematics and a member of the ICES Applied Mathematics Group. He holds the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents’ Chair in Mathematics No. 1.

His research interests include non-linear analysis, partial differential equations and their applications, calculus of variations, and optimization.

In a series of papers starting in 1990, Caffarelli studied viscosity solutions to non-linear partial differential equations, both the Monge–Ampère equation and the equation that models flow in a porous medium. This has proven to be an important means to arrive at the existence and uniqueness of solutions. As a result, Caffarelli has been cited as the world’s leading specialist in free-boundary problems for nonlinear partial differential equations, and a pioneer in methods tackling many classical problems that have long defied mathematicians.

With his collaborators, he has authored more than 250 scientific publications documenting this work.

Caffarelli is the second university Wolf Prize winner. He joins UT Mathematics Professor John Tate who won the 2002 Wolf Prize for mathematics.

This year’s Wolf Prize in the arts went to tenor Placido Domingo who became the first vocal artist to ever win the prize and he shared it with English conductor Sir Simon Rattle. Israeli physicist Jacob D. Bekenstein at Racah Institue of Physics won the physics prize. The others went to U.S.-based scientists, including chemists A. Paul Alivisatos at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Charles M. Lieber at Harvard, and in medicine, Ronald M. Evans at the Salk Institute. Read other stories about this prize.

Steele Prize winner Babuska, professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics and professor of mathematics, holds the Robert B. Trull Chair in Engineering. Presented annually by AMS, the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement is one of the highest distinctions in mathematics.

Babuska was honored "for his many pioneering advances in the numerical solution of partial differential equations over the last half century." The prize citation goes on to say: "In his work on finite element methods, Babuska has developed and applied mathematics in profound ways to develop, analyze, and validate algorithms which are crucial for computational science and engineering. In so doing, he has helped to define that field, and has had a great impact on the modern world. A constant characteristic of Babuska's work is the combination of deep and imaginative mathematical analysis with a constant concern for the practical implications of his work for engineering applications."

An exceptionally productive author, collaborator, and mentor, Babuska has published over 350 refereed journal articles and 26 books, has had nearly 150 co-authors, and has advised 40 Ph.D. students.

The citation concluded: "Ivo M. Babuska is among the foremost numerical analysts of all time and a unique leader in applied mathematics. His many contributions have had a lasting impact on mathematics, engineering, science, and industry."

Engquist was awarded the 2012 George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics distinguished in its selection by the membership of both the AMS and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Engquist, an ICES core faculty member and professor of mathematics, holds the Computational and Applied Mathematics Chair I, and directs the ICES Center for Numerical Analysis. The Birkhoff Prize is awarded every three years for outstanding contributions to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense.

The two prestigious organizations honored Engquist "for his contributions to a wide range of powerful computational methods over more than three decades," the prize citation says. His work blends mathematical analysis, modeling, and computation, and has led to numerical tools with enormous impact across a broad range of applications, including aerodynamics, acoustics, electromagnetism, computational fluid mechanics, and computational geoscience."

Photos from the tower lighting event can be found on the ICES Flickr site.