Emmanuel Candès Wins AMS-SIAM Birkhoff Prize

Emmanuel Candès, the Barnum-Simons Math+X Chair in Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University, will receive the 2015 AMS-SIAM George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics. Established in 1967, the Birkhoff Prize is jointly awarded by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense.

Candès was recognized for his work on compressed sensing, which revolutionized signal processing and medical imaging, along with his related work on computational harmonic analysis, statistics and scientific computing. Compressed sensing, a technique that came from Candès’ work with algorithms to improve magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) accuracy, utilizes two different data representations, producing fewer and highly accurate data points from the body part being imaged. Since its first application in MRIs, compressed sensing has been applied to analog-to-digital converters, digital cameras and a variety of theoretical problems.

Candès is professor of mathematics, statistics and electrical engineering at Stanford, and a member of the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering, also at Stanford. He has been a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2014. Prior to his appointment as a Barnum-Simons Chair, he was the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. Some of his other research interests include computational harmonic analysis, statistics, information theory, signal processing and mathematical optimization.

In 2006, Candès received the Alan T. Waterman Medal, the highest honor presented by the National Science Foundation. He also received the 2005 James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing from SIAM, the 2008 Information Theory Society Paper Award, the 2010 George Polya Prize from SIAM, the 2011 Collatz Prize awarded by the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization awarded jointly by the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and SIAM in 2012, and the 2013 Dannie Heineman Prize presented by the Academy of Sciences at Göttingen.