Philadelphia, PA, Jan. 26, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The 2023 John von Neumann Prize – the highest honor and flagship lecture of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) – is awarded to Yousef Saad, University of Minnesota, in recognition of his fundamental contributions to scientific computing. The talk is happening Tuesday, August 22 at the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) Congress. Saad’s work on algorithms is especially impactful to the fields of sparse linear systems, eigenvalue problems, nonlinear equations, graph algorithms, and can be applied to a wide range of problems in computational science and engineering including quantum chemistry, material science, and data science.
Additionally, his two books, Iterative Methods for Sparse Linear Systems and Numerical Methods for Large Eigenvalue Problems, have been highly influential on researchers and practitioners alike, and remain models of expository writing in these important areas of applied mathematics.
SIAM awards the John von Neumann Prize annually to an individual for outstanding and distinguished contributions to the field of applied mathematics and for the effective communication of these ideas to the community. It is one of SIAM’s most distinguished prizes.
“My students, post-docs, and collaborators contributed immensely to my research and made this four-decade journey an exciting one. I am indebted to them and to many others whose support made this work possible," said Saad.
Saad earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics at the University of Algiers in 1970. He went on to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of Grenoble in 1974, and a second doctorate in 1983. He was a senior computer scientist at the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development and an associate professor in the mathematics department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1986-1988. That same year, he moved to the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science as a senior scientist, until 1990, when he became a professor in the computer science and engineering department of the University of Minnesota. Saad continues to teach as a Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Professor and held the William Norris Land Grant Chair in Large-Scale Computing from 2006 to 2022. His research concentrates on iterative methods for solving large sparse linear systems and eigenvalue problems, sparse matrix computations, parallel algorithms in numerical algebra, numerical algorithms for materials science, and matrix methods for information sciences.
“My work started with the exploration of iterative methods in numerical linear algebra in the early 1980s. These methods and their parallel versions became mandatory when solving difficult problems in science and engineering, and so naturally, they gained enormous popularity in a wide range of disciplines, whether in computational fluid dynamics or in electronic structure calculations,” Saad said.
Saad has been an active member of SIAM for 41 years, including being named a SIAM Fellow (2010), and serving as an associate editor for the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis (1985-1993) and the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis (2008-2010). He also is an associate editor for Electronic Transactions of Numerical Analysis (2001-present), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2010), the recipient of numerous NSF research grants, and has organized several conferences and workshops.
This prize was established in 1959 to honor John von Neumann, a Hungarian American mathematician, physicist, and computer scientist, whose seminal work helped lead to the founding of modern computing. Learn more about SIAM’s John von Neumann Prize.
Saad will be awarded the John von Neumann Prize and deliver the associated lecture at the 2023 ICIAM Congress, which will be held August 20 – 25, 2023, in Tokyo, Japan. The talk is happening August 22 at 7:30 p.m. Japan Standard Time (subject to change). Register for ICIAM 2023 to attend.
About SIAM
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an international society of more than 14,500 individual, academic, and corporate members from more than 100 countries. SIAM helps build cooperation between mathematics and the worlds of science and technology to solve real-world problems through publications, conferences, and communities like chapters, sections and activity groups. Learn more at siam.org.
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