Michael Waterman

The William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics recognizes exceptional mathematical contributions that have had a lasting impact on scientific, business, finance and engineering applications. It is awarded to an individual for a single contribution or a body of contributions they have achieved in their lifetime of research and achievement in mathematics. The William Benter Prize, amounting to US$100,000, is awarded every two years, with the recipients giving a lecture at the City University of Hong Kong.

The 2020 William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics is awarded to Michael S. Waterman, University Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California and Distinguished Research Professor at University of Virginia.

Michael Waterman moved to USC in 1982 after positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho State University. He has a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Oregon State University, and a PhD in Statistics and Probability from Michigan State University. He has held visiting positions at the University of Hawaii (1979–80), the University of California at San Francisco (1982), Mt. Sinai Medical School (1988), Chalmers University (2000), and in 2000–01 he held the Aisenstadt Chair at University of Montreal. At the beginning of 2020, he became University Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California and was appointed Distinguished Research Professor at University of Virginia.

Michael Waterman was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1995. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering; he is also an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, IMS, SIAM, the International Society of Computational Biology, and the National Academy of Inventors. He is an elected Foreign Member of the French Académie des Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received honorary doctorates from Tel Aviv University and Southern Denmark University.

The William Benter Prizes for 2020 and 2022 will be awarded to the laureates at the International Conference on Applied Mathematics, ICAM 2022, organized at City University of Hong Kong, tentatively in May/June 2022. The prize founder, William (Bill) Benter, is a businessman and investment statistician who spent much of his career in Hong Kong.

Read more about the prize: https://www.cityu.edu.hk/rcms/WBP/index.html.