Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics Eitan Tadmor received the 2022 AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics and was invited to deliver the 2022 Gibbs Lecture at the joint math meeting of the American Mathematical Society.
“I have been mentored by and collaborated with many mathematicians who played an indispensable role in my career,” Tadmor said. “I feel blessed to be part of a worldwide network of mathematicians, which is like a home away from home for me.”
These honors recognized Tadmor’s original, broad and fundamental contributions to applied and computational mathematics, including conservation laws, kinetics, image processing and social dynamics.
The signature of Tadmor’s work is the interplay between analytical theories and computational algorithms for such equations. His many outstanding contributions include the development of high-resolution central schemes; entropy conservative/stable schemes; and the spectral viscosity method for nonlinear conservation laws. He collaborated in groundbreaking work on the regularization of conservation laws and their relation to kinetic formulation. He introduced novel ideas of multi-scale hierarchical decompositions of images with applications to problems in critical regularity spaces.
Currently, Tadmor is leading a research program in collective dynamics, with a series of novel contributions which include adaptive alignment; topologically based and multi-species dynamics; and development of a general paradigm for emergent behavior away from thermal equilibrium.
“My work in mathematics and applications has given me great joy. As a language spoken in different scientific disciplines, mathematics is constantly engaged with new developments in a variety of fields of science and technology,” Tadmor said. “The synergy between mathematics and applications requires the development of new ‘dialects’ in applied and computational mathematics. I am always fascinated by the creative tension between imagination and rigor needed to develop these dialects and their use in solving concrete problems.”
Tadmor received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1978 and began his career as a Bateman Research Instructor at Caltech (1980-82) before joining the faculties of Tel Aviv University (1983-1995) and UCLA (1995-2002). In 2002, he was recruited by the University of Maryland to lead the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling, where he served as director from 2002 to 2016. In 2016-17, he was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Studies (ITS) at ETH-Zürich.
Tadmor was a founding co-director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA (1999-2001) and the principal investigator of both an NSF Focus Research Group (2008-12) and the NSF Kinetic Research Network (Ki-Net) at the University of Maryland (2012-20). He gave an invited lecture at the ICM (Beijing, 2002); the SIAM invited address at the JMM (Baltimore, 2014); the 2016 Leçons Jacques-Louis Lions (Paris); a Nachdiplom Lecture series at ETH (Zürich, 2017); and a plenary address at the ICIAM (Valencia, 2019). He is the recipient of the 2015 SIAM-ETH Peter Henrici Prize and is a fellow of the AMS and SIAM.
The Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics is awarded every three years by the AMS and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense. The 2022 prize was presented to Tadmor in January during the Joint Prize Session at the 2022 Joint Mathematics Meeting in Seattle.
With his selection as Gibbs lecturer, Tadmor joined three former Gibbs lecturers from UMD: Johannes Burgers (1963), Elliott Montroll (1987) and Michael Fisher (1992). The AMS Council established the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship in 1923. Gibbs (1839-1903), a mathematical physicist, was one of the greatest scientists America has ever produced. These lectures aim to enable the public and the academic community to become aware of the contribution that mathematics is making to present-day thinking and to modern civilization.
This article includes content provided by the American Mathematical Society.
