Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics


Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics is an academic association dedicated to the use of mathematics in industry. SIAM is the world's largest professional association devoted to applied mathematics, and roughly two-thirds of its membership resides within the United States. Founded in 1951, the organization began holding annual national meetings in 1954, and now hosts conferences, publishes books and scholarly journals, and engages in lobbying in issues of interest to its membership. The focus for the society is applied, computational, and industrial mathematics, and the society often promotes its acronym as "Science and Industry Advance with Mathematics". Members include engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, both those employed in academia and those working in industry. The society supports educational institutions promoting applied mathematics.
SIAM is one of the four member organizations of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics.

Membership

Membership is open to both individuals and organizations. By the end of its first full year of operation, SIAM had 130 members; by 1968, it had 3,700.
Student members can join SIAM chapters affiliated and run by students and faculty at universities. Most universities with SIAM chapters are in the United States, but SIAM chapters also exist in other countries, for example at Oxford, at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and at Peking University. SIAM publishes the SIAM Undergraduate Research Online, a venue for undergraduate research in applied and computational mathematics.
In 2009, SIAM instituted a Fellows program to recognize certain members who have made outstanding contributions to the fields that SIAM serves.

Activity groups

The society includes a number of activity groups to allow for more focused group discussions and collaborations. Activity groups organize domain-specific conferences and minisymposia, and award prizes.
Unlike special interest groups in similar academic associations like ACM, activity groups are chartered for a fixed period of time, typically for two years, and require submitting a petition to the SIAM Council and Board for renewal. Charter approval is largely based on group size, as topics that were considered hot at one time may have fewer active researchers later.
Current Activity Groups:
Philosopher Ian Hacking notes that SIAM tends to focus on "'hard' or 'dry' applications", with less emphasis on the life sciences: "There is a lot more applied mathematics in the life sciences, and that field is growing incredibly fast, but not within SIAM."

Publications

Journals

, SIAM publishes 18 research journals:
SIAM publishes roughly 20 books each year, including textbooks, conference proceedings and monographs. Many of these are issued in themed series, such as "Advances in design and control", "Financial mathematics" and "Monographs on discrete mathematics and applications". In particular, SIAM distributes books produced by Gilbert Strang's Wellesley-Cambridge Press, such as his Introduction to Linear Algebra. Organizations such as libraries can obtain DRM-free access to SIAM books in eBook format for a subscription fee.

Conferences

SIAM organizes conferences and meetings throughout the year focused on various topics in applied math and computational science. For example, SIAM has hosted an annual conference on data mining since 2001. The establishment of the SIAM Conferences on Discrete Mathematics, held every two years, has been regarded as a sign of the growth of graph theory as a prominent topic of study.
In conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery, SIAM also organizes the annual Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, using the format of a theoretical computer science conference rather than the mathematics conference format that SIAM typically uses for its conferences.

Prizes and recognition

SIAM recognizes applied mathematician and computational scientists for their contributions to the fields. Prizes include:
The John von Neumann Lecture prize was established in 1959 with funds from IBM and other industry corporations, and is awarded for "outstanding and distinguished contributions to the field of applied mathematical sciences and for the effective communication of these ideas to the community". The recipient receives a monetary award and presents a survey lecture at the Annual Meeting.

MathWorks Mega Math (M3) Challenge

The Mathworks Mega Math Challenge is an applied mathematics modeling competition for high school students in the United States. Scholarship prizes totaled $60,000 in 2006, and have since been raised to $150,000. It is funded by Mathworks. Originally, the prize was sponsored by the financial services company Moody's and known as the Moody's Mega Math Challenge.

Leadership

The chief elected officer of SIAM is the president, elected for a single two-year term. SIAM employs an executive director and staff.
The following people have been presidents of the society: