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5/1/2009

Rice's Tapia, Symes among inaugural SIAM Fellows
Rice faculty members named to applied math society's elite ranks

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Two prominent Rice University mathematicians have been selected to the inaugural class of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Fellows Program. Richard Tapia and William Symes, both longtime members of Rice's Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics, were named today among the 183 inaugural members of SIAM's Fellows Program.

	RICHARD TAPIA		WILLIAM SYMES

"I am extremely pleased to see SIAM establish a fellows program," said Sallie Keller-McNulty, dean of engineering at Rice. "The induction of Richard Tapia and Bill Symes into this first class demonstrates that SIAM has indeed chosen some of the top applied mathematicians in the world to get this important program off to a prestigious start."

Tapia is University Professor and the Maxfield-Oshman Professor in Engineering. He is an internationally known researcher in the field of computational optimization. He is only the sixth person and the first mathematician in Rice's history to be named University Professor, the university's highest academic rank. Tapia, who joined Rice in 1970, is a former member the nation's highest scientific governing body, the National Science Board, and is the first Hispanic elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering.

Symes, Rice's Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics, is an internationally renowned researcher who is best known for his work in the field of computational seismology. Symes, who joined Rice in 1983, is the founding director of The Rice Inversion Project (TRIP), an industrial research consortium sponsored by firms in the oil and computer industries. Founded in 1992, TRIP aims to develop mathematical models that petroleum geologists can use to quickly and accurately interpret large seismic datasets.

SIAM Fellowship is an honor reserved for the most distinguished members of the 12,000-member society, which was established in 1952. "The announcement of the first class of SIAM Fellows is an important milestone for the applied mathematics and computational science community," said SIAM President Douglas Arnold.

SIAM is an international community of applied and computational mathematicians, computer scientists and other scientists and engineers that advances the fields of applied mathematics and computational science. The society publishes a series of premier journals and books, and it sponsors a wide selection of conferences and other programs. More information about SIAM is available at www.siam.org.