The Smale Prize recognizes major achievements in furthering the understanding of the connections between mathematics and computation. The award is named after Stephen Smale who contributed greatly to this understanding and many other fields of mathematics as well as being key to the founding of the Society. The prize is awarded to a researcher having received a doctoral degree within the 10 years prior to the award. The first prize has been awarded to Professor Snorre Christiansen of the University of Oslo. The Society for the Foundations of Computational Mathematics awarded the first Smale Prize to Professor Snorre Christiansen at its FoCM'11 meeting in Budapest on July 14, 2011. Symbolic of the prize, Professor Christiansen was given a Gömböc, the first known homogeneous object with one stable and one unstable equilibrium point.
Professor Christiansen of the University of Oslo, Norway, was awarded the prize for his contributions to computational mathematics of partial differential equations. Most of Professor Christiansen's work is motivated by the design of numerical methods for various equations arising in physics. The citation made particular note of his use of Calderon’s formulas to construct preconditioners for the electric field equations, his contributions to the development of exterior calculus and cohomological analysis of finite element methods, and his convergence results for lattice gauge theory. Further information concerning Professor Christiansen and the award ceremony can be found at http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/na/FoCM11/smale_prize.html
The Society for Foundations of Computational Mathematics (FoCM) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1995 that supports and promotes research on foundations of computational mathematics. It fosters interaction among mathematics, computer science and other areas of computational science through its conferences, workshops and publications. More information concerning the Society can be found at http://focm-society.org/
October 5, 2011