Alumnus Awarded Purdue Honorary Degree

Andrew J. Majda returned to the West Lafayette campus on May 13 to receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree. Majda is the Morse Professor of Arts and Sciences at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Born and raised in northwest Indiana, he studied mathematics at Purdue as an undergraduate in the late sixties and fondly remembers two of his math instructors, J. J. Price and former Purdue professor Dale Thoe. Majda received his B.S. degree in 1970 and went on to earn a Ph.D. at Stanford. In 1973, he began his career as an instructor at Courant. He rejoined Courant in 1994 after holding professorships at Princeton, UC Berkeley, and UCLA.

Majda's primary research interests are modern applied mathematics in the broadest sense, merging asymptotic methods, numerical methods, physical reasoning, and rigorous mathematical analysis. He is known for both his theoretical contributions to partial differential equations and his applied contributions to scattering theory, shock waves, combustion, vortex motion, turbulent diffusion, and atmosphere ocean science. At Courant, he has created the Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science with a multidisciplinary faculty to promote cross-disciplinary research with modern applied mathematics and climate modeling and prediction.

Majda is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has received numerous honors and awards for excellence in his field, including the National Academy of Science Prize in Applied Mathematics and Numerical Analysis, the John von Neumann Award of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Gibbs Prize of the American Mathematical Society. He also has been awarded the Medal of the College de France and is a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.