Awards & Winners

Joseph Keller

Date of Birth 31-July-1923
Place of Birth Paterson
(Passaic County, New Jersey, Area codes 862 and 973, Area code 973, Area code 862)
Nationality United States of America
Profession Mathematician, Scientist
Joseph Bishop Keller is an American mathematician who specializes in applied mathematics. He is best known for his work on the "Geometrical Theory of Diffraction". He obtained his PhD in 1948 from New York University under the supervision of Richard Courant. He was a Professor of Mathematics in the Courant Institute at New York University until 1979. Then he was Professor of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University until 1993, when he became Professor Emeritus. He has a brother who was also a mathematician, Herbert B. Keller, who has studied numerical analysis, scientific computing, bifurcation theory, path following and homotopy methods, and computational fluid dynamics. Herbert Keller was a professor at Caltech. Both brothers have contributed to the fields of electromagnetics and fluid dynamics. He worked on the application of mathematics to problems in science and engineering, such as wave propagation. He contributed to the Einstein–Brillouin–Keller method for computing eigenvalues in quantum mechanical systems. In 1988 he was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science, and in 1997 he was awarded the Wolf Prize by the Israel-based Wolf Foundation. In 1996, he was awarded the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics. In 1999 he was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip. He also won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2012 for studying the forces which determine the motion of a human ponytail. This makes him the only person to win more than one Ig Nobel Prize. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Awards by Joseph Keller

Check all the awards nominated and won by Joseph Keller.

1996


Wolf Prize in Mathematics
(For his profound and innovative contributions, in particular to electromagnetic, optical, acoustic wave propagation and to fluid, solid, quantum and statistical mechanics.)

1988


National Medal of Science for Mathematics and Computer Science
(For his outstanding contribution to the geometrical theory of diffraction. This is a major extension of geometrical optics which succeeds, after many centuries, in adding the physics of diffraction to the simple ray concepts of optics and of other wave motions.)