| Activity | Education:
BSc in Mathematics, Toronto; PhD, Princeton, (1968); Jeffrey Williams Prize, Canadian Mathematical Society (1982); Norbert Wiener Prize, AMS-SIAM (1990)
Career:
Carl F. Braun Professor of Engineering and Professor of Control and Dynamic Systems at Caltech. Expertise in Mechanics, dynamics and control systems. Mechanical systems with symmetry analyzed using geometric, analytical, and computational techniques as well as dynamical systems, control theory, and bifurcation theory. Applications are made to a variety of engineering and spacecraft systems.
He has done extensive research in the area of geometric mechanics, with applications to rigid body systems, fluid mechanics, elasticity theory, plasma physics, as well as to general field theory. His work in dynamical systems and control theory emphasizes how it relates to mechanical systems and systems with symmetry, along with concrete application areas of dynamical systems and optimal control, including Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS), space systems, and structured integration methods. He is one of the original founders in the early 1970's of reduction theory for mechanical systems with symmetry, which remains an active and much studied area of research today.
He has won a number of awards for his research. Much of this research can be found from his books and papers and some of his ongoing research is described on his projects page.
Marsden, together with Alan Weinstein, was one of the world leading authorities in mathematical and theoretical classical mechanics. He has laid much of the foundation for symplectic topology. He had the Marsden-Weinstein quotient named after him.
Prizes, Awards, medals:
The Jeffery-Williams Prize (1981); the Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics, (1990) jointly awarded by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS) "for his outstanding contributions to the study of differential equations in mechanics: he proved the existence of chaos in specific classical differential equations; his work on the momentum map, from abstract foundations to detailed applications, has had great impact." Also awarded the Max Planck Research Award for Mathematics and Computer science (2000); and the prestigious John von Neumann Lecture (2005), which is awarded by SIAM to recognize outstanding contributions to the field of applied mathematical sciences and for their effective communication to the community.
Memberships:
FRS Canada (1993); Fellow American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1997) |