George Papanicolaou

George Papanicolaou received his Ph.D. at the Courant Institute, NYU in 1969 and joined the faculty there becoming a professor in 1976. In 1993 he moved to Stanford University where he has been professor of mathematics since that time. In the past he has been interested in waves and diffusion in inhomogeneous or random media and in the mathematical analysis of multi-scale phenomena that arise in their study. Applications come from electromagnetic wave propagation in the atmosphere, underwater sound, waves in the lithosphere, diffusion in porous media, etc. He has studied both linear and nonlinear waves and diffusion, in both direct and inverse problems. He is now working on assessing multiple scattering effects in imaging and communication systems, including time reversal arrays. Another recent interest is the use of asymptotics for stochastic equations in analyzing complex models of financial markets and in data analysis. Prof. Papanicolaou is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, won the SIAM von Neumann Prize in 2006 and also the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics in 2010.