August 13, 2007—Dr. Robert McLachlan was recently honored with the Germund Dahlquist Prize by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The citation on the award identified “his outstanding contributions to geometric integration and composition methods, in particular. His work has found applications in many areas, especially to problems in physics.”
The Dahlquist Prize is awarded to a young scientist, normally under 45 years of age, for original contributions to fields associated with Germund Dahlquist, especially the numerical solution of differential equations and numerical methods for scientific computing. McLachlan received a monetary award and certificate, and gave a survey lecture on “Geometric Integration of ODEs and PDEs,” presented in conjunction with his invited address as Plenary Speaker at the International Conference on Scientific Computing and Differential Equations, SciCADE 07. “It was great to see so many talks and minisymposia on geometric integration at SciCADE,” he remarked. “With so many young people entering the field, and so many new applications being opened up, it has a bright future.”
Robert McLachlan is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Institute for Fundamental Sciences at Massey University in New Zealand. His main field of research is geometric integration. “Geometric integration is a relatively new branch of the numerical analysis of differential equations,” McLachlan explains. “By studying the structural, geometric, or qualitative features of the equations, and building these properties into numerical methods, very reliable methods can be obtained. These have been used to do long-time studies of the motion of the solar system, of particles in circular accelerators, and of chaos in dynamical systems.”
The prize and lecture were presented on July 12, at SciCADE 07, held this year in Saint-Malo, France. The selection committee included Sebastian Reich, Chair, University of Potsdam, Germany; Desmond Higham, University of Strathclyde, UK; Bo Kagstrom, Umea University, Sweden; Ben Leimkuhler, University of Edinburgh, UK; and Andrew Wathen, Oxford University, UK.
The prize is named for Germund Dahlquist in recognition of his pioneering work in numerical analysis and, in particular, his work on the numerical solution of differential equations; it was established by SIAM in 1995. The Dahlquist prize is awarded every two years by SIAM, 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 www.siam.org.