Igor Mezić, professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Mathematics at UC Santa Barbara, member of the UNIRI International Scientific Council and honorary professor of the University of Rijeka, has been named the recipient of the biennial Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Activity Group on Dynamical Systems (SIAG/DS) J. D. Crawford Prize, established in 2000.
The Crawford Prize recognizes contributions from a paper addressing fundamental issues in the dynamical-systems field. Mezić’s single-author paper, titled “Spectrum of the Koopman Operator, Spectral Expansions in Functional Spaces, and State-Space Geometry,” published in the journal Nonlinear Science in 2019, presented a mathematical theory that made it easier to understand and speed up an array of previously unsolvable computations in a wide range of applications, including fluid dynamics, energy-efficient design, network security and operations, and complex systems dynamics.
“It’s wonderful to me that the dynamical systems community deems my work worthy of the Crawford Prize,” said Mezić, who is also director of UCSB’s Center for Energy Efficient Design and head of the Buildings and Design Solutions Group at the CoE’s Institute for Energy Efficiency. “The depth and breadth of dynamical systems research is immense, and much of it is of top technical quality and has broad impact in engineering and the sciences. The value of the prize is heightened for me just by the sheer quality and volume of the competition for it.”
Mezić has previously won numerous prizes for his research, among them the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Mathematics, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award on “Control of Mixing” from IEEE. He also won the United Technologies Senior Vice President for Science and Technology Special Achievement Prize in 2007 for his contribution to a variety of engineering technologies.
Read the full announcement HERE.