Awarded to Professor Weinan E, Princeton University, as a scientist under 42 years of age having already an outstanding scientific reputation in the field of industrial and applied mathematics.
Weinan E was born in 1963 in China where he also finished his bachelor and master degrees. He received his PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1989 (under Björn Engquist). He was a long-term member of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton from 1992 to 1994 and became a professor at the Courant Institute at New York University in 1994. In 1999, he moved to Princeton University where he holds a professorship in the Department of Mathematics and in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. In 1996 he received the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and in 1999 he was awarded the Feng Kang Prize for Scientific Computing.
The scientific work of Weinan E covers many areas of applied mathematics ranging from fluid dynamics to condensed matter physics, including incompressible flows, turbulence, statistical physics, superconductivity, liquid crystals and polymers, epitaxial growth, and micromagnetics. His early contributions were in the field of homogenization of fully nonlinear wave equations, and multiscale problems has remained one of his major fields until today. In his subsequent work on liquid crystals he provided a geometrically nonlinear continuum model, which allowed for a first explanation of the formation of filaments in the smectic-isotropic transition. In micromagnetics he devised, partially together with Garcia, Wang and Gimbutas, new numerical algorithms for finding solutions to the Landau-Lifshitz- Gilbert equation. Thus, for the first time fast-switching processes and the hysteresis effect in ferromagnetic materials can be simulated reliably and efficiently.
Weinan E is a scientist of exceptional vision and scope. His work is a sophisticated combination of modeling, mathematical analysis, and numerics, and it is always devoted to providing new insights into real-world processes.
Subcommittee for the 2003 ICIAM Collatz Prize
- Olavi Nevanlinna (chair);
- Grigory Barenblatt;
- Leah Keshet;
- Alexander Mielke;
- Etienne Pardoux.