UCLA Professor Receives Highest Honor for Applied Mathematics

Longtime UCLA professor Stanley Osher today received the highest honor in applied mathematics, the Gauss Prize.

Osher received the award during the opening ceremony of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul, South Korea.

The citation honoring Osher said he has made “influential contributions to several fields in applied mathematics and his far-ranging inventions have changed our conception of physical, perceptual, and mathematical concepts, giving us new tools to apprehend the world.”

The prize named for 19th-century mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss is awarded at each congress, which is held every four years

Osher has collaborated with colleagues in a wide range of fields and the mathematical techniques he has pioneered have been highly influential.

The results of Osher’s research have improved MRI scans and medical image analysis, advanced computer chip design, helped law enforcement agencies combat crime, enhanced computer vision, provided new ways to forecast weather, identify the source of earthquakes and revolutionized computer modeling for the design of supersonic jets.

Osher said he was “truly honored” to be the third recipient of the Gauss Prize, and thanked his sister Sondra Jaffe, “for convincing me that we could both join the middle class by becoming mathematicians in the post-Sputnik era.”

Osher also praised the UCLA administration and his colleagues in the mathematics department “for their support in building up applied mathematics” and colleagues outside the department “for the incredibly pleasant interdisciplinary research atmosphere that exists here.”

Osher has been a UCLA professor since 1977 and has trained and mentored more than 50 doctoral students. His students have used mathematics to create special effects in dozens of movies, including “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Osher was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Osher has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a Fulbright Fellow. He was among the top 1 percent of the most frequently cited scholars in both mathematics and computer science between 2002 and 2012.

Osher once referred to himself as “the Barry Manilow of mathematics” because “I write the algorithms that make the computer sing.”

--City News Service

PHOTO Stanley Osher. Photo courtesy UCLA.