News Release

Gerhard Wanner receives SIAM's George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition

The SIAM prize recognizes Pólya's legacy of effectively communicating mathematics

Grant and Award Announcement

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

Gerhard Wanner of the University of Geneva is the 2015 recipient of the George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition.

Wanner is being honored primarily for the five books he has co-authored. They display deep mathematics, presented with elegance, enthusiasm, wit, scholarship, and much history. These books have uniquely delineated numerical ODEs (especially stiff equations) and geometric integration and created an historical perspective for the teaching and understanding of analysis and geometry.

Gerhard Wanner retired from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, in 2007, where he had been a full professor since 1976. He received his doctorate from the University of Innsbruck in 1965.

Wanner has served as president of the Section of Mathematics at the University of Geneva, and as secretary, vice-president and president of the Swiss Mathematical Society. He received the Peter Henrici Prize jointly with Ernst Hairer in 2003. His research interests are in numerical analysis, in particular, numerical methods for differential equations.

Wanner will receive an engraved medal and a cash award of $10,000 at the SIAM Prizes and Awards Luncheon at the 8th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM 2015) in Beijing, China next month. The luncheon will be held 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, August 13 at the China National Convention Center.

The George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition honors the renowned Hungarian mathematician and was created in 2013 to recognize Pólya's legacy of effectively communicating mathematics. It is awarded every two years to an outstanding expositor of the mathematical sciences, either for a specific work or for the cumulative impact of multiple expository works that communicate mathematics effectively. The nature of the work may range from popular accounts of mathematics and mathematical discovery to pedagogy to systematic organization of mathematical knowledge. This is the first award of the prize.

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About SIAM

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an international society of more than 14,000 individual, academic and corporate members from 85 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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