George H. Weiss (February 19, 1930 – February 14, 2017) was an American applied mathematician and physicist at the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

, known for his work on

random walk In mathematics, a random walk is a random process that describes a path that consists of a succession of random steps on some mathematical space. An elementary example of a random walk is the random walk on the integer number line \mathbb Z ...

s. He did his undergraduate studies at the City College of New York and

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, graduating in 1951, and earned a Ph.D. from the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...

in 1958.

Awards

In 1967, Weiss and

Marvin Zelen Marvin Zelen (June 21, 1927 – November 15, 2014) was Professor Emeritus of Biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), and Lemuel Shattuck Research Professor of Statistical Science ...

shared the Washington Academy of Sciences award for their contributions in Mathematics. Established in 1939, this award recognizes noteworthy accomplishments by young scientists (40 years of age and under). In May 2010, the NIH held a symposium entitled "Random Walks in Biology and Beyond", in honor of Weiss's 80th birthday and recent retirement. In July 2010, at the Mexican Meeting on Mathematical and Experimental Physics, Weiss was awarded the Leopoldo García-Colín-Scherer Medal. This medal has been established in 2001 and awarded every three years to recognize outstanding international scientists for their contributions to the development of science.

Research

Main contributions of Weiss are in the theory of random walks, in particular, the development of the Continuous Time Random Walk (CTRW). The original article that introduced CTRW has been cited more than 2000 times, and this work found applications in many different fields. In the summer of 2017, the European Physical Journal B (Condensed Matter and Complex Systems) is planning to publish a Special Issue: "Continuous Time Random Walk: fifty years on", which celebrates 50 years since the appearance of this seminal paper. The submissions to this issue are accepted until 31 May 2017
EPJB
. Weiss himself has made many significant contributions in applying the CTRW framework in the areas of optical imaging, financial market theory, and other fields. In recent years, his research in optical imaging was focusing on the application of CTRW in the case of the spatially anisotropic optical properties. Weiss also used the renewal theory techniques to analyze the traffic flow, aiming to understand the problems of traffic delay and congestion. Besides his contributions in applications of CTRW to optical imaging, made also significant contributions in general medical research, and has worked extensively on crystalline lattices and their properties.

Family

George H. Weiss was married to Delia Weiss (née Orgel; a sister of chemist

Leslie Orgel Leslie Eleazer Orgel FRS (12 January 1927 – 27 October 2007) was a British chemist. He is known for his theories on the origin of life. Biography Leslie Orgel was born in London, England, on . He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in chemi ...

). They have three children and nine grandchildren. He lived in Silver Spring, Maryland until his death.

Selected publications

;Books *. *. *. ;Research articles *. *.

References

External links

George H. Weiss MSCL Home Page

{{DEFAULTSORT:Weiss, George Herbert 1930 births 2017 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians Place of birth missing 21st-century American mathematicians Columbia University alumni University of Maryland, College Park alumni