The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) recently announced their Class of 2023 fellows, which included Applied Mathematics’s Professor James Meiss “For contributions to the understanding of the onset of chaos and transport in Hamiltonian and volume-preserving dynamical systems.”
Meiss received his Ph.D in Physics from the University of California Berkeley, then become a plasma physics research scientist at the Institute for Fusion Studies. In 1989, the newly-constituted CU Boulder Applied Mathematics program hired Dr. Meiss to become a professor. During this transition, he would attend the SIAM Snowbird Dynamical Systems conference in 1992. Speaking about this experience, Professor Meiss explained:
“I was amazed at how welcoming this group was to a broad spectrum of interests, including mine—of course. I ended up co-organizing the next Snowbird meeting, becoming involved in the formation of the new Dynamical Systems Activity group (through what is now DSWeb), and was one of the founding editors for the new SIAM Journal of Dynamical Systems in 2002. I still view SIAM as my home scientific community, and am extremely pleased that I was selected to be a fellow.”
Professor Meiss’s work in chaos and transport has had a large impact on the field of dynamical systems, with the MacKay-Meiss-Percival (MMP) papers reaching close to 750 citations and Meiss and Ott publishing a paper with 368 citations. The MMP papers lead to a founding theory regarding transport in systems that are neither completely integrable or uniformly hyperbolic. The Meiss and Ott paper provided theory regarding observations of “stickiness” among islands in area-preserving maps. In 2020, Meiss provided a review of his field for the journal Chaos, which was celebrating their 25th anniversary. Meiss’s work in Hamiltonian and Incompressible dynamics, as well as generalizations of Lagrangian coherent structures to non-autonomous systems have been impactful to the field of dynamical systems, has placed him as a leader in the field, and deserving of recognition via this momentous accomplishment of being named as a SIAM fellow.
The Department of Applied Mathematics congratulates Professor Meiss on this career achievement following decades of hard work and dedication to the field of dynamical systems!