April 6, 2022
On March 31, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) announced that Lek-Heng Lim, Professor of the Department of Statistics, Computational and Applied Mathematics Initiative, and the College, is among 26 members to be honored in the 2022 Class of SIAM Fellows. These distinguished members were nominated for their exemplary research as well as outstanding service to the community. Through their various contributions, SIAM Fellows are a core group of individuals helping to advance the fields of applied mathematics and computational science.
According to the announcement, Lim is being recognized for “pioneering contributions to numerical multilinear algebra, and for introducing high-level algebra, geometry, and topology to applied mathematics.”
Lim, who joined the faculty in 2010, was also a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for 2020 and the winner of the SIAM James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing in 2017.
"Lek-Heng is a world leader and a pioneer in tensors, multilinear algebra, and their applications. His pathbreaking contributions, his mathematical creativity, broadness, and productivity make his selection as a SIAM Fellow richly deserved,” said Professor and Chair of the Department of Statistics Dan Nicolae. “He is also a wonderful teacher and mentor who has had an enormous impact at University of Chicago and beyond."
Lim works with the Committee on Computational and Applied Mathematics, which was established in 2016 to address the critical need to train a new generation of computational and applied mathematicians who can confront data-centric problems in the natural and social sciences. His recent courses include Matrix Computation, Multivariate Data Analysis via Matrix Decompositions, Optimization, and Statistical Models and Methods.
"The reputation of the University of Chicago as a place that truly values scholarship has drawn us a self-selected stream of students and postdocs,” Lim said. “I have benefited from working with these talented and motivated students and postdocs, both current and former. Any honors that I've received in my career I owe in large part to them and to senior colleagues in my field who supported me."