Philadelphia, PA — Ioannis G. Kevrekidis of Princeton University is the recipient of the 2016 W. T. and Idalia Reid Prize, awarded by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in recognition of his pioneering work on the "equation-free" framework for computational study of complex dynamical systems, and for his many contributions to control theory and its applications. Kevrekidis delivered the associated prize lecture, “Data and the Computational Modeling of Complex Systems,” at the 2016 SIAM Annual Meeting (AN16) in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 13.
Pam Cook, University of Delaware; Ioannis Kevrekidis, Princeton University
Kevrekidis is Pomeroy and Betty Perry Smith Professor in Engineering and Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University, which he first joined in 1986. He received his diploma in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University, Athens, in 1982 and his MA in Mathematics and PhD in Chemical Engineering both in 1986 from the University of Minnesota.
Kevrekidis received the 2003 SIAG/Dynamical Systems J. D. Crawford Prize from SIAM and was elected a SIAM Fellow in 2010. In 2016 he was elected Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens.
His research interests, initially in algorithm development for the study of nonlinear dynamics and instabilities, have later broadened to include algorithms for complex/multiscale dynamical systems and the link between data mining/machine learning with modeling and scientific computation.
“This is a body of work that has been developing over 15 years and involves many people, friends and collaborators in the US and around the world, from students and postdocs to scientists like Bill Gear and Raphy Coifman,” Kevrekidis explained. “The main idea is to treat complex, molecular dynamics, agent based, discretized PDE, simulation codes as computational experiments from which we obtain computational data - analyzing these data on the fly helps us solve macroscopic models of complex systems without explicitly obtaining them - hence the term ‘equation free’.”
Established by SIAM in 1993 to recognize outstanding work in, or other contributions to, the broadly defined areas of differential equations and control theory, the Reid Prize has been given annually since 2000, and may be awarded either for a single notable achievement or a collection of such achievements. The prize fund was endowed by the late Mrs. Idalia Reid to honor her husband.
The recipient of the W. T. and Idalia Reid Prize receives a cash award of $10,000 and an engraved medal.
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