Creative Minds, Charmed Lives

The following sections are included:

• Contents

• Foreword

• Preface

• Acknowledgements

Béla Bollobás is well-known for a wide range of significant contributions to graph theory, combinatorics and functional analysis. His recent work on applications of random graph techniques to percolation theory is a ground-breaking contribution to the theoretical basis of a newly emerging field motivated by physical phenomena and first explored by computer simulation…

Leonid Bunimovich has contributed to the fundamental understanding of dynamical systems and made important applications of probability and statistics to geophysical hydrodynamics, neuroscience, operations research, statistical mechanics, mathematical biology and numerous other scientific areas…

Tony Fan-Cheong Chan (陈繁昌) is well-known for his interdisciplinary research at the interface between applied mathematics and current rapidly developing areas in image processing, computer vision, VLSI circuit layout and advanced architecture parallel computers. He is one of the few scholars with rare administrative and organizational skills which he has put to good use in advancing the image of mathematics and mathematicians in the eyes of the public and the policy makers in the United States. His boundless energy and enthusiasm for the promotion of mathematics is legendary…

Sun-Yung Alice Chang (张聖容) is well-known for her many important contributions to real harmonic analysis, geometric analysis, nonlinear partial differential equations and applications of analysis to problems in differential geometry. In 1995, the American Mathematical Society awarded her the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics (awarded every two years to a woman for outstanding research in mathematics) for her deep contributions to the study of partial differential equations on Riemannian manifolds…

Jennifer Tour Chayes has made important contributions to a newly emerging and rapidly growing multidisciplinary field that straddles mathematics, physics and theoretical computer science. Her current theoretical work on auction algorithms, self-engineered networks and phase transitions in combinatorics and computer science has found applications in the Internet and the computer industry…

Carl de Boor made fundamental contributions to the theory of splines and numerous applications of splines that range from highly efficient and reliable numerical algorithms to complete software packages. Some of these applications are in computer-aided design and manufacturing (of cars and airplanes, in particular), production of typesets in printing, automated cartography, computer graphics (movie animation, for example) and signal and image processing…

Persi Diaconis is perhaps one of the most unusual mathematicians of our time. After studying the violin when young, he switched at the age of 14 to magic in which he had a successful and colorful career for almost 10 years, and then, at the age of 24, he made another decisive switch to mathematics…

David Donoho is world-renowned for many important contributions to statistics and its applications to image and signal processing, in particular to the retrieval of essential information from "sparse" data. He is reputed to be the most highly-cited mathematician for work done in the last decade (1994–2004) — a reflection of the impact of his work on engineering and the physical and medical sciences…

Robert F. Engle started his university education as a physicist at Williams College and Cornell University but switched to economics for his PhD at Cornell, specializing in the use of time series in econometric analysis. In 1982, he formulated a model, known as an ARCH (acronym for "autoregressive conditional heteroskedacity") model, to study time-varying volatility in inflation. Soon afterwards, it was realized that his model could be applied to financial econometrics. In subsequent work and in collaboration with others, he extended his model to the so-called GARCH (generalized ARCH) and GARCH-M models, and introduced fundamental concepts which have set new directions for modern econometrics. His ideas and techniques have become indispensable tools in risk management in the financial sector. For his fundamental contributions, he was awarded in 2003 the Nobel Prize in economic sciences with his collaborator Clive Granger…

Hans Föllmer is renowned for fundamental contributions to statistical mechanics, stochastic analysis and mathematical finance. He is also known for his indefatigable energy and enthusiasm in actively promoting the applications of mathematics, especially to financial markets…

Avner Friedman has made important contributions, both in theory and applications, to partial differential equations, stochastic differential equations and control theory. His career, especially during the past two decades, epitomizes a personal mission and relentless drive in bringing the tools of modern analysis to bear in the service of industry and science…

Roe Goodman of Rutgers University was interviewed on 11 February 2003 at the Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore while he was visiting IMS and the Department of Mathematics. He was a guest participant in the IMS program on Representation Theory of Lie Groups. The hour-long interview covered topics that range from teaching and research in mathematics to the influence of masters in mathematics and music…

Bryan T. Grenfell made important contributions to population dynamics with his pioneering work on the mathematical modeling of infectious diseases like measles and whooping cough, foot and mouth disease in farm animals and influenza of avian, equine and human types. He has done extensive collaborative multidisciplinary work at the interface between theoretical models and empirical data in population biology…

Takeyuki Hida (飛田武幸) is well-known for his pioneering work in establishing and developing a new field in probability theory — the field of white noise analysis, which has now found numerous applications outside probability in quantum dynamics and biology, and within mathematics itself in differential equations and geometry…

Roger Howe is well-known for his path-breaking work in the theory of Lie groups and representations and for his impact on mathematical education and pedagogy through his teaching, writings and active involvement in educational reforms. His research is also directed toward the applications of symmetry to harmonic analysis, group representations, automorphic forms and invariant theory…

Wilfrid Kendall followed in the scientific footsteps of a distinguished father (probabilist and statistician, David Kendall) and established himself as a well-known expert in probability theory who has made significant and wide-ranging contributions to random processes, stochastic geometry, stochastic calculus and perfect simulation. His interest in the use of computers in teaching and research has also led him to develop computer algebra software in statistics and probability…

Lawrence Klein is a pioneer in the creation of computer models for econometrics and economic forecasting using mathematical techniques. From the formative years of his education at University of California at Berkeley and at MIT during the early war years, he moved to the Cowles Commission for Economic Research (then at University of Chicago) where he formulated a model of the United States economy and predicted an economic upturn after the war. He is well-known for the enhanced economic model called the Klein–Goldberger model and for the famous "Wharton Econometric Forecasting Model". He has built economic models of the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and other developed and developing countries. He has served as a consultant to the governments of many countries; in particular, to China as it opened up to the West. The impact of his work on modern economics and his influence on present day economists are well recognized. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 1980…

Brian E. Launder made important contributions, both experimental and mathematical, to fluid mechanics and convective heat transfer and pioneered the use of mathematical models to study turbulent flows. He was at the forefront of the development of numerical methods for turbulence models. He has also applied his methods to industrial problems related to turbomachinery and was active in leading research on environmental issues. His influence in engineering is extended through his wide and deep collaboration with his numerous students and other researchers…

Fanghua Lin (林芳华) is world-renowned for his important contributions to classical analysis and its applications to nonlinear partial differential equations…

Pao Chuen Lui (雷普权) played a pioneering and pivotal role in the establishment and development of the scientific and engineering capabilities of the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) and the Ministry of Defense (Mindef)…

Eric Maskin has made fundamental and groundbreaking contributions to numerous areas of game theory and economic theory, such as implementation theory, auction theory, the economics of incentives, and social choice theory. Among the wide range of topics he is currently studying are the design of auctions, comparison of different electoral rules, the pros and cons of political accountability, and the advantages and drawbacks of protecting intellectual property. His work, sometimes in collaboration with co-authors including Partha Dasgupta, John Riley, Jean Tirole, Jean-Jacques Laffont, Peter Diamond, and Drew Fudenberg, has been widely applied to industrial organization, finance, development, and other fields within economics and political science…

Eduardo Massad is internationally acclaimed for his work in the field of infectious disease epidemiology, both in the mathematical modeling of infectious diseases and in the introduction of successful disease control programs in Brazil…

Daniel McFadden made fundamental and important contributions to behavioral economics in general and to choice theory in particular. He is an active proponent and exponent of the use of mathematics and statistics in solving problems of economic measurement and analysis arising in applied economics. The econometric models that he developed in choice theory have been widely used in economics and other social sciences; for example, to practical problems concerning transportation, choice of occupation, brand of automobile purchase, and decisions on marriage and number of children. He has developed scientific methods for conducting and interpreting surveys on social and economic issues. His numerous publications cover a wide range of areas in economics and econometrics. For his contributions to the development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice, he was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, which he shared with Jim Heckman…

Keith Moffatt has, in a long and distinguished career, made important contributions to fluid mechanics in general and to magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in particular. His scientific achievements are matched by his organizational and administrative skills, which he devoted most recently to the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge…

Stanley Osher is an extraordinary mathematician who has made fundamental contributions to applied mathematics, computational science and scientific computing and who has cofounded three companies based, in part, on his research. He has applied his pioneering work on level set methods and other numerical methods for partial differential equations to the field of image processing and, in particular, to video image enhancing and movie animation. He has been featured prominently in the scientific and international media such as Science News, Die Zeit and Los Angeles Times. He is perhaps the most highly cited researcher in the field of scientific computing…

Doug Roble is world-renowned for his important contributions to computer vision and computer graphics and for pioneering applications to movie special effects and animation…

Ron Shamir made significant contributions to optimization and graph algorithms and is one of the leaders in bioinformatics and computational biology whose pioneering work contributed to the historic completion of the ambitious Human Genome Project in 2003…

Albert Nikolaevich Shiryaev is well-known for his important contributions to probability theory, mathematical and applied statistics and financial mathematics, and in particular, to statistical sequential analysis and optimal stochastic control. He has published more than 160 main scientific papers and is the author or co-author of numerous definitive books and monographs in those fields…

David O. Siegmund is widely acclaimed for his fundamental contributions to the theory of optimal stopping time in sequential analysis and for his recent work on the application of analysis to genomics. He is well-known for his philosophical delight and mathematical ability in commuting between the theoretical heights of probability theory and the murky depths of statistical applications…

Theodore Slaman and W. Hugh Woodin have recently made important contributions to logic, especially to recursion theory and set theory respectively…

Terry Speed is world-renowned for his important and numerous contributions to the applications of statistics to genetics and molecular biology, and in particular, to biomolecular sequence analysis, the mapping of genes in experimental crosses and human pedigrees, and the analysis of gene expression data. A member of the NIH Genome Study Section from 1995 to 1998, he investigated fundamental problems arising from the Human Genome Project…

Charles Stein is considered to be one of the most original thinkers who made fundamental contributions to probability and statistics. He has received many honors and awards and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. He has given many invited lectures, notably as plenary speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians, and as the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Wald Lecturer, Rietz Lecturer and Neyman Lecturer. He is now Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Stanford University and continues to be active in research in statistics. On 22 March 2010, a symposium in probability and statistics was held at Stanford University to celebrate Stein's 90^th birthday and was jointly organized by Stanford's Department of Mathematics and NUS's IMS…

Gilbert Strang is a prominent scholar in applied mathematics and an active promoter of mathematics and mathematical education in the United States. He has made numerous contributions to numerical analysis, wavelets and signal processing. He is also well-known for his textbooks on linear algebra and applied mathematics at the undergraduate and advanced levels. He is editor of many well-known journals and has given invited lectures throughout the world. He has received numerous honors and awards and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served on many committees, in particular, as President of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 1999 and 2000. He was Chair of the US National Committee on Mathematics for 2003–2004. He has been Professor of Mathematics at MIT since 1970…

Eitan Tadmor has made fundamental contributions to numerical analysis, the general theory of applied partial differential equations and scientific computation. His influence on applied mathematics is as deep as it is wide-ranging and as mathematical as it is organizational. His prolific research output, both personal and collaborative, must surely rank him as one of the top leading figures in his field. His direct influence may be glimpsed from an article written on the occasion of his 50^th birthday and published in Computational Methods in Applied Mathematics, Vol. 4, No. 3 in 2004…

Michael Todd is well-known for his fundamental contributions to continuous optimization, both in the theoretical domain and in the development of widely-used software for semidefinite programming…

Sergio Verdú is world-renowned for pioneering the field of multiuser detection in wireless communications and for fundamental work on data transmission and compression in information theory…

Michael S. Waterman is world-acclaimed for pioneering and fundamental work in probability and algorithms that have tremendous impact on molecular biology, genomics and bioinformatics. He was a founding member of the Santa Cruz group that launched the Human Genome Project in 1990, and his work was instrumental in bringing the public and private efforts of mapping the human genome to their completion in 2003, two years ahead of schedule…

The following sections are included:

• Author Index

• Photo Credits

• Disclaimer