Awarded to Siddharta Mishra (Department of Mathematics, ETH Zürich, Switzerland) for his breakthrough contributions that skillfully combine modelling of real world problems and rigorous mathematical analysis with the development of efficient and accurate numerical schemes and high performance computing.
The Collatz Prize was established to provide international recognition to individual scientists under 42 years of age for outstanding work on industrial and applied mathematics. It was created on the initiative of GAMM, and first awarded in 1999. Carrying a cash award of USD 5000, the Collatz Prize is presently funded by GAMM.
Siddhartha Mishra, born in 1980 in India, studied mathematics at the IISc and the Tata Institute in Bangalore. After holding positions at the University of Oslo and ETH Zurich, in 2012 he became, at age 32, tenured professor at ETH Zurich and Professor II at the University of Oslo. In 2012 he received an ERC Starting Grant and in 2015 the prestigious Richard-von-Mises Prize awarded by GAMM. He was a plenary speaker at HYP 2012, the most important conference in his field, and an invited speaker at ICM 2018.
Siddhartha Mishra is an ingenious designer of excellent numerical methods, mainly for systems of hyperbolic conservation and balance laws, and has a deep understanding of their mathematical and physical background. He has produced codes for complicated realistic problems with realistic data; for example, tsunamis generated by rock slides and waves in the solar atmosphere. He uses numerical experiments to get insight into the analysis of partial differential equations. In particular, together with his former student U. S. Fjordholm, and with R. Käppeli and E. Tadmor, he showed that in fluid dynamics the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is due to physics and not to numerical schemes. This has led them to invent a scheme to numerically approximate measure-valued solutions of hyperbolic conservation laws, and has resulted in the first proof of convergence to entropy measure-valued solutions of the compressible Euler equations in several space dimensions. On the way, Mishra and co-workers made several seminal breakthroughs: a proof that Essentially-Non-Oscillatory (ENO) reconstruction is stable (this was an open problem for about 25 years); the creation of the TeCNO scheme - the first stable scheme of arbitrarily high order for multidimensional nonlinear systems of conservation laws; and development of the concept of multilevel Monte Carlo methods for uncertainty quantification for nonlinear hyperbolic systems - with Ch. Schwab and others. With others, he designed well-balanced schemes for stratified Euler and MHD equations and, with Le Floch, methods with well-controlled dissipation for shock-capturing computations.
Siddhartha Mishra is devoted to combining rigorous mathematics with efficient computations that are based on a deep theoretical knowledge and insight into real-world problems.
Subcommittee for the 2019 ICIAM Collatz Prize
- Zdenek Strakos (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic), Chair;
- Albert Cohen (Sorbonne Université, Paris, France);
- Motoko Kotani (Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan);
- Art B. Owen (Stanford University, USA);
- Ulrich Rüde (FA Universität Erlangen-Nürenberg, Erlangen, Germany);
- Thomas Grandine (The Boeing Company, USA).