The Distinguished Service to the Profession of Applied Mathematics prize, established by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1985, is in the form of a certificate awarded every year at the SIAM Annual Meeting. The annual prize is awarded to an applied mathematician who has made distinguished contributions to the furtherance of applied mathematics on the national level. This year's SIAM Annual Meeting was held in Boston, July 10–14, 2006.
Dr. Peter D. Lax received the 2006 award in recognition of his lifetime of leadership and support for the applied and computational mathematics community. This award expresses SIAM's appreciation for his many services: for his professional service with the national mathematical societies, for his government service on the President's Committee on the National Medal of Science, for his advisory roles in the DOE National Laboratories, and for his vision for the future role of high performance computing and leadership on the National Science Board.
Peter D. Lax received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1949 from New York University under the direction of Kurt Friedrichs. He joined the faculty of New York University and has spent essentially his entire career at New York University and the Courant Institute. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of many prizes and awards including the Norbert Wiener Prize, the National Medal of Science, the Wolf Prize, and the Steele Prize. In 2005, he was awarded the prestigious Abel Prize.
Professor Lax laid the foundations for the modern theory of both linear and nonlinear hyperbolic equations and has made fundamental contributions to numerical methods for partial differential equations.
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) was founded in 1952 to support and encourage the important industrial role that applied mathematics and computational science play in advancing science and technology. Along with publishing top-rated journals, books, and SIAM News, SIAM holds about 12 conferences per year. There are also currently 45 SIAM Student Chapters and 15 SIAM Activity Groups.
SIAM's 2006 Annual Meeting themes included dynamical systems, industrial problems, mathematical biology, numerical analysis, orthogonal polynomials and partial differential equations.
For complete details, go to http://www.siam.org/meetings/an06/index.php .