Two Postdocs shortlisted for the 17th Leslie Fox Prize
John Pearson, a Whittaker Fellow in the School of Mathematics, is a finalist for the 17th IMA Leslie Fox Prize with his paper 'Fast iterative solvers for reaction-diffusion control models of chemical and biological processes'. Olivier Fercoq – a former postdoc in the School (also partially funded by NAIS) and now a postdoc at Telecom Paris Tech – is also a finalist with his paper 'Accelerated, parallel and proximal coordinate descent', co-authored with Peter Richtarik. The paper will appear in the SIAM Journal on Optimization.
Only six finalists have been selected. A First and a number of Second Prizes will be awarded on June 22, 2015 in Glasgow, at the Leslie Fox Prize meeting collocated with the 26th Biennial Conference on Numerical Analysis.
The Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) is a biennial prize established in 1985 by the IMA in honour of mathematician Leslie Fox (1918-1992). The prize honours "young numerical analysts worldwide" (any person who is less than 31 years old), and applicants submit papers for review. A committee reviews the papers, invites shortlisted candidates to give lectures at the Leslie Fox Prize meeting, and then awards First Prize and Second Prizes based on "mathematical and algorithmic brilliance in tandem with presentational skills"