Philadelphia, PA, March 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Dr. Mark Newman, University of Michigan, has been awarded the 2026 John von Neumann Prize – the highest honor and flagship lecture of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) – for his significant contributions to theoretical and algorithmic aspects of network science and to their use in understanding real-world systems.
His lecture and the presentation of this prize will take place at the 2026 SIAM Annual Meeting (AN26), which will be held this summer. Learn more about AN26 and stay tuned for more details about Dr. Newman’s talk.
Dr. Newman’s work has illuminated notions of structure within networks and has provided widely used algorithms for finding network structure and for quantifying its impact on the behavior of networks. He has authored multiple books and review papers that have spurred the widespread dissemination of network science concepts across the research community.
The John von Neumann Prize is awarded annually to an individual for outstanding and distinguished contributions to the field of applied mathematics and for the effective communication of these ideas to the community.
“It’s a tremendous honor to receive this prize,” Dr. Newman said. “I see it not only as recognition of my work, but also of the growing field of network science.”
Dr. Newman received his undergraduate degree in physics in 1988 and Ph.D. in physics in 1991, both from the University of Oxford. He went on to pursue postdoctoral research at Cornell University before taking a position at the Santa Fe Institute, a theoretical research institute in New Mexico devoted to the study of complex systems. In 2002, he moved to the University of Michigan, where he is currently the Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics and a professor in the university’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems.
Dr. Newman is known for his work on mathematical methods and applications in the interdisciplinary study of networked systems, such as social and technological networks. His research spans random graph models of network structure, community detection, mixing patterns in networks, the stochastic block model and inference methods, message passing and belief propagation, the small-world effect, network epidemiology, and applications to a range of practical problems spanning physics, computer science, biology, ecology, and the social sciences.
“Ideas from network science underlie a wide range of applications, including online search and social media, bioinformatics, disease modeling, and understanding ecosystems, markets, and human society. My research has focused on developing foundational mathematical methods that make analyzing and interpreting these complex systems possible,” Dr. Newman said.
As a 10-year member of SIAM, Dr. Newman has earned numerous awards and honors, among them being named a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Physical Society (APS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also named a Simon’s Foundation Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, in addition to receiving the 2014 ISI Lagrange Prize and the 2024 APS Leo P. Kadanoff Prize. Learn more about Dr. Newman.
This prize was established in 1959 to honor John von Neumann, a Hungarian American mathematician, physicist, and computer scientist, whose seminal work helped lead to the founding of modern computing. Learn more about SIAM’s John von Neumann Prize.
About SIAM
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an international society of 14,000+ individual, academic, and corporate members from 100+ countries. SIAM fosters the development of applied mathematics and computational methodologies needed in various application areas. Through publications, conferences, and communities like student chapters, geographic sections, and activity groups, SIAM builds cooperation between mathematics and the worlds of science and technology to solve real-world problems. Further information is available at siam.org.
- Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics, University of Michigan