Keble Mathematician is International Winner

Keble Professorial Fellow, Gui-Qiang Chen, a world-leader in partial differential equations, has won one of the most prestigious honours in applied mathematics. A paper by Professor Chen, and his collaborator Professor Mikhail Feldman of the University of Wisconsin, has been selected for the 2011 SIAG/APDE Prize by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). 

Chen and Feldman's paper  "Global Solutions of Shock Reflection by Large-Angle Wedges for Potential Flow" (Annals of Mathematics, Volume 171, Issue 2 (2010)), has been judged the outstanding paper in its field published in the last four years. 

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics is an international community of over 13,000 individual members. Almost 500 academic, manufacturing, research and development, service and consulting organizations, government, and military organizations worldwide are institutional members. SIAM fosters the development of applied mathematical and computational methodologies, and promotes the idea of applied mathematics in partnership with computational science as being essential for solving many real-world problems. 

The innovative mathematical approaches developed in Professor Chen’s prize-winning paper have provided an exciting range of new understandings of the behaviour of shock waves (blasts, supersonic booms) arising in many areas of science and engineering such as aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, hydraulics, astrophysics, and the safe control of detonations, among others. 

The prize was awarded at the SIAM Biennial Conference on the Analysis of Partial Differential Equations in San Diego, California, on 16 November. Professor Chen delivered the 2011 SIAG/Analysis of Partial Differential Equations Prize Lecture during the ceremony.   

Professor Chen (pictured on the right of the photograph, with Professor Feldman) is a leader of Keble College’s developing Nonlinearity research cluster (part of the Advanced Studies Centre) which examines how other problems can similarly be resolved through the application of complex mathematical analysis and modelling.