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Steven Alan Orszag (February 27, 1943 – May 1, 2011) was an American mathematician.

Life and career

Orszag was born to a Jewish family in Manhattan, the son of Joseph Orszag, a lawyer. Orszag's paternal grandparents were emigrants from Hungary. Orszag was raised in Forest Hills, Queens and graduated from Forest Hills High School. In 1962, at the age of 19, he graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. He did post graduate study at Cambridge University and in 1966 graduated with a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University. His thesis adviser was Martin David Kruskal. In 1967, Orszag was appointed as a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he collaborated with Carl M. Bender, and was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1984, he was appointed Forrest E Hamrick Professor of Engineering at Princeton University. In 1998, he accepted a position at Yale University and in 2000, he was named the Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2011.

Orszag has won numerous awards including Sloan Fellowship and Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Fluid and Plasmadynamics Award, the Otto Laporte Award of the American Physical Society, and the Society of Engineering Science's G. I. Taylor Medal.

Orszag specialized in fluid dynamics, especially turbulence, computational physics and mathematics, electronic chip manufacturing, computer storage system design, and other topics in scientific computing. His work included the development of spectral methods, pseudo-spectral methods, direct numerical simulations, renormalization group methods for turbulence, and very-large-eddy simulations. He was the founder of and/or chief scientific adviser to a number of companies, including Flow Research, Ibrix (now part of HPQ), Vector Technologies, and Exa Corp. He has been awarded 6 patents and has written over 400 archival papers.

With Carl M. Bender he wrote Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers: Asymptotic Methods and Perturbation Theory, a standard text on mathematical methods for scientists. Orszag has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.

Personal life

In 1964, he married Reba Karp (sister of Joel Karp, the co-designer of the Intel 1103 chip); they had three sons: Michael, Peter, and Jonathan. Peter and Jonathan were both Marshall Scholars.

References

1. ^ Yale Bulletin: "In memoriam: Steven Alan Orszag" May 11, 2011
2. ^ University of St Andrews, Scotland - School of Mathematics and Statistics: "Steven Alan Orszag" by J.J. O'Connor and E.F. Robertson October 2011
3. 2011 Pi Lambda Phi Membership Directory
4. Institute for Advanced Study profile
5. "Steven Orszag appointed the new Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics". Yale Bulletin & Calendar, Volume 29, Number 10. Yale University. November 10, 2000. Archived from the original on April 18, 2009. Retrieved 2008-11-27. Orszag is the coauthor or coeditor of nine books, including "Studies in Applied Mathematics," "Numerical Analysis of Spectral Methods," "Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers," "Supercomputers and Fluid Dynamics," "Japanese Supercomputing: Architecture, Algorithms, and Applications," and "Large Eddy Simulation of Complex Engineering and Geophysical Flows." His latest book, "Partial Differential Equations for Scientists and Engineers," a collaboration with C.M. Bender, is forthcoming.
6. "John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation O Fellows Page". Guggenheim Foundation. Archived from the original on September 22, 2008. Retrieved 2008-11-27.
7. "William Prager Medal in Solid Mechanics G. I. Taylor Medal in Fluid Mechanics". Society of Engineering Science. Archived from the original on 2008-06-02. Retrieved 2008-11-27. Each award consists of a medal bearing the likeness of the person for whom the award is named and a monetary award of $2000. Recipients will give an address at the annual meeting of the Society...The G. I. Taylor Medal is awarded for outstanding research contributions in either theoretical or experimental Fluid Mechanics or both. The recipients need not be members of the Society, but become a lifetime members upon receipt of the medals.
8. Billingham, John (May 2000). "Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers: Asymptotic Methods and Perturbation Theory". UK Nonlinear News, Issue Twenty. University of Leeds Department of Applied Mathematics. Retrieved 2009-04-18. ...the classic book, first published in 1978, on asymptotic methods for ordinary differential equations, difference equations and integrals by Bender and Orszag. Book review.
9. Goedbloed, J. P.; Stefaan Poedts (2004). Principles of magnetohydrodynamics (illustrated ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 348. ISBN 978-0-521-62607-1. Retrieved 2009-04-18. ...classical texts ... e.g. Bender and Orszag ... on linear differential equations ...
10. ISI Highly Cited Author - Steven Orszag Archived 2006-05-18 at the Wayback Machine
11. PC Magazine: "The First 1024 (1K) Dynamic RAM: The 1103 March 6, 1984
12. http://www.peterorszag.com and http://www.jonorszag.com

• 1943 births
• 2011 deaths
• 20th-century American mathematicians
• 21st-century American mathematicians
• American fluid dynamicists
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty
• Princeton University alumni
• Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge
• Princeton University faculty
• Yale University faculty
• Numerical analysts
• Fellows of the American Physical Society
• American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
• People from Forest Hills, Queens
• Forest Hills High School (New York) alumni
• 20th-century American Jews
• Orszag family