Inaugural Class of SIAM Fellows

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics has announced its inaugural class of 183 Fellow in its brand new Fellows program. (The American Physical Society has had such a program for a long time, and the American Mathematical Society membership has voted down at least a couple of attempts to institute such a program.) Among this initial group are 3 of my colleagues at Oxford, 1 person (the expected one) currently at Caltech, and a whopping 8 people currently at Cornell. The last list includes two members of my thesis committee. As discussed in the press release, the initial list was chosen using very specific criteria (people who had won certain major awards, etc.), so this class of Fellows was perhaps a little more predictable than perhaps some of the future classes will be.