News Release

SIAM Activity Group on Dynamical Systems Jürgen Moser Lecture Prize awarded

Grant and Award Announcement

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

June 7, 2007 -- The 2007 SIAM Activity Group on Dynamical Systems Jürgen Moser Lecture Prize was presented on May 28 to Dr. Harry L. Swinney, Director of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Swinney presented the Jürgen Moser Lecture at the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems, held this year from May 28 through June 1, at Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort in Snowbird, Utah. He was selected to deliver the lecture for his elegant and incisive laboratory experiments that have elucidated the nonlinear dynamics of systems far from equilibrium.

The SIAM Activity Group on Dynamical Systems (SIAG/DS) established the Jürgen Moser Lectureship in 2000. It is awarded every two years at the biennial SIAM Conference on Dynamical Systems to a person who has made distinguished contributions to nonlinear science. The term “nonlinear science” is used in the spirit of the SIAG/DS meetings; specifically it includes dynamical systems theory and its applications as well as experiments and computations/simulations. The members of the selection committee for this award were: Eric Kostelich (Chair), Philip Holmes, Mark Levi, Rafael de la Llave, and Edriss Titi.

Dr. Swinney received his Ph.D. in Physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1968 and was one of the pioneers of chaos theory, most notably for the experiments he did with Jerry Gollub on the onset of turbulence for water in rotating cylinders, the Couette-Taylor system. His general interests have concerned instabilities, chaos, pattern formation and turbulence in systems driven away from equilibrium by the imposition of gradients in temperature, velocity, and concentration. Dr. Swinney is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Jürgen Moser (1928-1999) was one of the world’s leading mathematicians who helped develop influential theories in celestial mechanics and dynamical systems theory (among others) and is renowned for his work on the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) theory. He received his doctorate from Göttingen and went on to be a Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (1955-1980) and at ETH Zurich (1980-1995). Jürgen Moser received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1995.

The SIAM Activity Group on Dynamical Systems provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and information between mathematicians and applied scientists whose work involves dynamical systems. The goal of this group is to facilitate the development and application of new theory and methods of dynamical systems. The techniques in this area are making major contributions in many areas, including biology, nonlinear optics, fluids, chemistry, and mechanics. This activity group supports the web portal DSWeb, sponsors special sessions at SIAM meetings, organizes a biennial conference, and awards biennial prizes.

SIAM is an international community of over 11,000 individual members, including applied and computational mathematicians, computer scientists, and other scientists and engineers. The Society advances these fields by publishing a series of premier journals and a variety of books, and producing a wide selection of conferences. More information about SIAM is available at http://www.siam.org.


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