Stanley J. Osher

Stanley J. Osher is Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Applied Mathematics Program at UCLA, Director of Special Projects in the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), and member of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA. Osher has invented (or co-invented) and developed many highly successful numerical methods for computational physics, image processing and other fields. He is the primary developer of level set methods and total variation based optimization. These two numerical methods are staples in image processing and mathematical modeling. Osher championed the development and application of essentially non-oscillatory methods in scientific computing and helped develop fast optimization techniques for sparse reconstruction with new applications to continuum physics. He overcame the "curse of dimensionality" for a class of control theory problems and played a significant role in the development of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at University of California, Los Angeles. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has received honorary degrees from Hong Kong Baptist University (2009) and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Cachan, France (2006). Osher has founded or co-founded three successful companies: Cognitech, Level Set Systems, and Luminescent Technologies. Osher has received the 2007 USACM Computational and Applied Sciences Award, the SIAM Kleinman Prize (2005), the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers 2002 Computational Mechanics Award, the International Cooperation Award from the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (2007), the Computational and Applied Sciences Award from the United States Association for Computational Mechanics (2007), the 2003 ICIAM Pioneer Prize, and the NASA Public Service Group Achievement Award (1992).