Philadelphia, PA, Feb. 13, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Marsha Berger, New York University and Flatiron Institute, has been awarded the 2025 John von Neumann Prize – the highest honor and flagship lecture of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) – in recognition of her foundational work in adaptive mesh refinement and embedded boundary methods for partial differential equations (PDEs).
Berger has been a leader in these areas, with important contributions to method development, theoretical stability and accuracy results, efficient software for serial and high-performance systems, and applications to science and engineering including aerodynamics, astrophysics, cosmology, plasma physics, subsurface flow, engine design, and tsunami modeling. Berger’s work has fundamentally advanced simulation methodology for PDEs.
Berger will be awarded the John von Neumann Prize and deliver the associated lecture at SIAM/CAIMS Annual Meetings 2025 (AN25), which will be held July 28-August 1, 2025, in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Learn more about AN25 and stay tuned for more details about Berger’s talk.
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 is one of SIAM’s most distinguished prizes.
“I’m excited and grateful to be recognized by my peers,” Berger said. “Knowing that my work has been used and helpful to others is a big motivator for me.”
Berger received her Ph.D. from Stanford in 1982 and went on to become a professor of computer science and mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU) after completing her postdoctoral research. She was also an active member of the team at NASA’s Ames Research Center that developed the Cartesian cut-cell method Cart3D. In 2000, she was elected to the National Academy of Science. After retiring from NYU as Professor Emeritus in 2022, she joined the Center for Computational Mathematics at the Flatiron Institute as a senior research scientist.
“Most people wouldn’t realize it, but computational fluid dynamics, and in particular adaptive mesh refinement, plays a key role in many of the simulations that impact daily life. Weather prediction relies heavily on numerical tools, as does airplane design. Tsunami simulations, which help determine evacuation routes in case of future earthquakes, are another example of how these methods are used in practice,” Berger said.
For 43 years, Berger has found a professional home in SIAM after spending much of her career feeling like “a fish out of water,” navigating the mathematical side of computer science and the computational side of mathematics, both of which were considered fringe at the time. She was named a 2009 SIAM Fellow and has served on the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing editorial board (1990-98), the James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Committee (2000-01), and SIAM’s Human Resources Committee and Board of Trustees (2004-12). She was also a member of the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecture Committee (2010-12), the SIAM Committee on Science Policy (2012-20), the SIAM Fellows Selection Committee (2013-15; 2021-22), and the SIAM Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering Best Paper Prize Committee (2024).
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 85 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. Learn more at siam.org.
- New York University Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist, Flatiron Institute
