The John von Neumann Prize (until 2019 named John von Neumann Lecture Prize) was established in 1959 with funds from IBM and other industry corporations, and is awarded for "outstanding and distinguished contributions to the field of applied mathematical sciences and for the effective communication of these ideas to the community". It is considered the highest honor bestowed by the

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific socie ...

(SIAM). The recipient receives a monetary award and presents a survey lecture at the SIAM Annual Meeting.

Selection process

Anybody is able to nominate a mathematician for the prize. Nominations are reviewed by a selection committee, consisting of members of SIAM who serve two-year appointments. The committee selects one recipient for the prize nine months before the SIAM Annual Meeting and forwards their nomination to SIAM's Executive Committee and Vice President for Programs.

Past lecturers

*1960: Lars Valerian Ahlfors *1961:

Mark Kac Mark Kac ( ; Polish: ''Marek Kac''; August 3, 1914 – October 26, 1984) was a Polish American mathematician. His main interest was probability theory. His question, " Can one hear the shape of a drum?" set off research into spectral theory, the i ...

*1962:

Jean Leray Jean Leray (; 7 November 1906 – 10 November 1998) was a French mathematician, who worked on both partial differential equations and algebraic topology. Life and career He was born in Chantenay-sur-Loire (today part of Nantes). He studied at Éc ...

*1963: Stanislaw M. Ulam *1964:

Solomon Lefschetz Solomon Lefschetz (russian: Соломо́н Ле́фшец; 3 September 1884 – 5 October 1972) was an American mathematician who did fundamental work on algebraic topology, its applications to algebraic geometry, and the theory of non-linear o ...

*1965:

Freeman J. Dyson Freeman John Dyson (15 December 1923 – 28 February 2020) was an English-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mec ...

*1966:

Eugene P. Wigner Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner ( hu, Wigner Jenő Pál, ; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his con ...

*1967:

Chia-Chiao Lin Chia-Chiao Lin (; 7 July 1916 – 13 January 2013) was a Chinese-born American applied mathematician and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lin made major contributions to the theory of hydrodynamic stability, ...

*1968:

Peter D. Lax Peter David Lax (born Lax Péter Dávid; 1 May 1926) is a Hungarian-born American mathematician and Abel Prize laureate working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics. Lax has made important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dyn ...

*1969:

George F. Carrier George Francis Carrier (May 4, 1918 – March 8, 2002) was an engineer and physicist, and the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Applied Mathematics Emeritus of Harvard University. He was particularly noted for his ability to intuitively model a ...

*1970: James H. Wilkinson *1971:

Paul A. Samuelson Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "h ...

*1974:

Jule Charney Jule Gregory Charney (January 1, 1917 – June 16, 1981) was an American meteorologist who played an important role in developing numerical weather prediction and increasing understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere by devisin ...

*1975: Sir

James Lighthill Sir Michael James Lighthill (23 January 1924 – 17 July 1998) was a British applied mathematician, known for his pioneering work in the field of aeroacoustics and for writing the Lighthill report on artificial intelligence. Biography J ...

*1976: Rene Thom *1977:

Kenneth J. Arrow Kenneth Joseph Arrow (23 August 1921 – 21 February 2017) was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972. In economics ...

*1978:

Peter Henrici Peter Henrici (born 31 March 1928) is a Swiss Jesuit priest, Blondelian philosopher and professor (1960–1993) at the Gregorian University. He was Auxiliary Bishop of Chur from 1993 to 2007. Biography Born on 31 March 1928 at Zurich, Henrici ...

*1979:

Kurt O. Friedrichs Kurt Otto Friedrichs (September 28, 1901 – December 31, 1982) was a noted German-American mathematician. He was the co-founder of the Courant Institute at New York University, and a recipient of the National Medal of Science. Biography Friedri ...

*1980:

Keith Stewartson Keith Stewartson (20 September 1925 – 7 May 1983) was an English mathematician and fellow of the Royal Society. Early life The youngest of three children, Stewartson was born to an English baker in 1925. He was raised in Billingham, County Dur ...

*1981:

Garrett Birkhoff Garrett Birkhoff (January 19, 1911 – November 22, 1996) was an American mathematician. He is best known for his work in lattice theory. The mathematician George Birkhoff (1884–1944) was his father. Life The son of the mathematician Geo ...

*1982:

David Slepian David S. Slepian (June 30, 1923 – November 29, 2007) was an American mathematician. He is best known for his work with algebraic coding theory, probability theory, and distributed source coding. He was colleagues with Claude Shannon and Ric ...

*1983:

Joseph B. Keller Joseph Bishop Keller (July 31, 1923 – September 7, 2016) was an American mathematician who specialized in applied mathematics. He was best known for his work on the "geometrical theory of diffraction" (GTD). Early life and education Born i ...

*1984: Jurgen Moser *1985:

John W. Tukey John Wilder Tukey (; June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American mathematician and statistician, best known for the development of the fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distribut ...

*1986:

Jacques-Louis Lions Jacques-Louis Lions (; 3 May 1928 – 17 May 2001) was a French mathematician who made contributions to the theory of partial differential equations and to stochastic control, among other areas. He received the SIAM's John von Neumann Lecture pr ...

*1987:

Richard M. Karp Richard Manning Karp (born January 3, 1935) is an American computer scientist and computational theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most notable for his research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing ...

*1988:

Germund Dahlquist Germund Dahlquist (16 January 1925 – 8 February 2005) was a Swedish mathematician known primarily for his early contributions to the theory of numerical analysis as applied to differential equations. Dahlquist began to study mathematics at Stoc ...

*1989:

Stephen Smale Stephen Smale (born July 15, 1930) is an American mathematician, known for his research in topology, dynamical systems and mathematical economics. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 and spent more than three decades on the mathematics facult ...

*1990: Andrew J. Majda *1991: No award was made *1992:

R. Tyrrell Rockafellar Ralph Tyrrell Rockafellar (born February 10, 1935) is an American mathematician and one of the leading scholars in optimization theory and related fields of analysis and combinatorics. He is the author of four major books including the landmark ...

*1993: No award was made *1994: Martin D. Kruskal *1995: No award was made *1996:

Carl de Boor Carl-Wilhelm Reinhold de Boor (born 3 December 1937) is a German-American mathematician and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1993, de Boor was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contr ...

*1997:

William Kahan William "Velvel" Morton Kahan (born June 5, 1933) is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, who received the Turing Award in 1989 for "''his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis''", was named an ACM Fellow in 1994, and inducte ...

*1998:

Olga Ladyzhenskaya Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya (russian: Óльга Алекса́ндровна Лады́женская, link=no, p=ˈolʲɡə ɐlʲɪˈksandrəvnə ɫɐˈdɨʐɨnskəɪ̯ə, a=Ru-Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya.wav; 7 March 1922 – 12 Jan ...

*1999: Charles S. Peskin *2000:

Persi Diaconis Persi Warren Diaconis (; born January 31, 1945) is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University. He is particularly known f ...

*2001:

David L. Donoho David Leigh Donoho (born March 5, 1957) is an American statistician. He is a professor of statistics at Stanford University, where he is also the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the Humanities and Sciences. His work includes the develop ...

*2002: Eric S. Lander *2003:

Heinz-Otto Kreiss Heinz-Otto Kreiss (14 September 1930 – 16 December 2015) was a German mathematician in the fields of numerical analysis, applied mathematics, and what was the new area of computing in the early 1960s. Born in Hamburg, Germany, he earned his Ph.D ...

*2004: Alan C. Newell *2005:

Jerrold E. Marsden Jerrold Eldon Marsden (August 17, 1942 – September 21, 2010) was a Canadian mathematician. He was the Carl F. Braun Professor of Engineering and Control & Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology.. Marsden is listed as an ISI ...

*2006: George C. Papanicolaou *2007:

Nancy Kopell Nancy Jane Kopell (born November 8, 1942, New York City) is an American mathematician and professor at Boston University. She is co-director of the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology (CompNet). She organized and directs th ...

*2008: David Gottlieb *2009:

Franco Brezzi Franco Brezzi (born 29 April 1945 in Vimercate) is an Italian mathematician. Education He graduated in 1967 at the Università di Pavia under the supervision of Enrico Magenes. He was full professor of Mathematical Analysis at the Politecnico di ...

*2010:

Bernd Sturmfels Bernd Sturmfels (born March 28, 1962 in Kassel, West Germany) is a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and is a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig sin ...

*2011:

Ingrid Daubechies Baroness Ingrid Daubechies ( ; ; born 17 August 1954) is a Belgian physicist and mathematician. She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression. Daubechies is recognized for her study of the mathematical methods that enhance i ...

*2012: Sir

John M. Ball Sir John Macleod Ball (born 19 May 1948) is a British mathematician and former Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He was the president of the International Mathematical Union from 2003 to 2006 and a Fellow of ...

*2013: Stanley J. Osher *2014:

Leslie F. Greengard Dr. Leslie F. Greengard is an American mathematician, physicist and computer scientist. He is co-inventor with Vladimir Rokhlin Jr. of the fast multipole method (FMM) in 1987, recognized as one of the top-ten algorithms of the 20th century. Gree ...

*2015: Jennifer Tour Chayes *2016:

Donald E. Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer sc ...

*2017: Bernard J. Matkowsky *2018:

Charles F. Van Loan Charles Francis Van Loan (born September 20, 1947) is an emeritus professor of computer science and the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering at Cornell University,

*2019:

Margaret H. Wright Margaret H. Wright (born February 18, 1944) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. She is a Silver Professor of Computer Science and former Chair of the Computer Science department at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New ...

*2020:

Nick Trefethen Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen (born 30 August 1955) is an American mathematician, professor of numerical analysis and head of the Numerical Analysis Group at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. Education Trefethen was born 30 August 19 ...

*2021: Chi-Wang Shu *2022: Leah Keshet

References

{{Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Awards of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Awards established in 1959 Lecture series

Selection process

Past lecturers

See also

References