Friday 14 September 2018

George Green Medal 2018 Ceremony

The New Forest, UK – 11 September 2018

green medal frontThe George Green Medal 2018 was presented on the occasion of the 41st International Conference on Boundary Elements and other Mesh Reduction Methods (BEM/MRM 41). The ceremony took place during a special session on Tuesday 11th September, followed by a keynote address from the medal recipient.

The George Green Medal was established by the University of Mississippi at Oxford, Mississippi, USA, and the Wessex Institute and is supported by Elsevier. It is in honour of the man who single-handedly set up the basis for the modern Boundary Element Method, among other notable achievements.

The Medal is awarded to those scientists who have carried out original work with practical applications in the field of Boundary Elements and other Mesh Reduction Methods, continuing in this manner to further develop the pioneering ideas of George Green. They are also persons of the highest integrity who, by sharing their knowledge, have helped to establish research groups all around the world. The Medal is given once a year and is presented during the BEM/MRM Conference.

George Green Portrait Photo
George Green (1793-1841)
George Green was a self-taught genius who mysteriously delivered one of the most influential mathematics and physics works of all time. He educated himself in mathematics and self-published the work “An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism”. In his very first article he derived the Green’s first, second and third identities, forged the concept of Green’s function, and solved the problem of electrical potential created by a single charge placed inside a spherical metal shell. The ideas of Green’s function forever changed the landscape of science, as many physics and mathematics problems have been solved using this technique. As Green died early, and his work was discovered only posthumously, it remains a mystery today how Green could produce such a masterpiece without the guidance of a great teacher or school and, in fact, without a formal education. Only recently, due to the advent of powerful computers, has it been possible to take full advantage of Green’s pioneering developments.


Prof Ney Augusto Dumont
Prof Ney Augusto Dumont

The recipient of the 2018 Medal was Prof Ney Augusto Dumont, Professor and Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil.

Ney received his BS degree in Civil Engineering at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, in 1972, and the MS and Dr.-Ing. degrees in Structural Engineering at PUC-Rio, in 1973, and at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, in 1978, respectively.

His research interests are in computational mechanics, variational methods, hybrid methods, FEM, BEM, fracture mechanics, time-dependent problems, gradient elasticity and numerical integration methods.

Ney has supervised 60 MS and PhD works. He also has over 150 publications in international journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters. He is Fellow of Wessex Institute, UK, Member of the Board of Principal Editors of WIT Transactions and Associate Editor of EABE – International Journal on Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements.

Keynote Presentation:

“CONCEPTUAL REVIEW OF VARIATIONALLY-BASED HYBRID BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHODS”

The presentation will discuss the hybrid boundary element method (HBEM) which was introduced in 1987 on the basis of the Hellinger-Reissner potential, as a generalization of Pian’s hybrid finite element method. This new two-field formulation makes use of the same fundamental solutions of the collocation boundary element method (CBEM) to interpolate the stress field in the domain of an elastic body, which ends up discretized as a super element with arbitrary shape and arbitrary number of degrees of freedom located along the boundary. Shortly thereafter, a variational counterpart – called hybrid displacement boundary element method (HDBEM) – was proposed by Brebbia and Figueiredo on the basis of the Hu potential and making use of three field functions, with equivalent advantages and disadvantages when compared to the CBEM. The present paper discusses these methods as well as the traditional CBEM. The mathematical and mechanical properties of the resulting matrix equations are investigated and a series of concepts in both HDBEM and CBEM that have not been properly considered by previous authors – particularly concerning convergence issues – are redefined. This review paper does not include a thorough literature survey. It rather completes and extends a paper published by the author in 2003 and carries out a theoretical, comparative analysis of the three methods, with many physical considerations, some recently added conceptual features and a few academic illustrations.

For further information about the George Green Medal, please contact us at the Wessex Institute:

George Green Medal
Wessex Institute
Ashurst Lodge, Ashurst
Southampton
SO40 7AA, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 238 029 3223
Fax: +44 (0) 238 029 2853
Email: wit@wessex.ac.uk

See the following conference web pages for details this and the previous George Green Medal presentations:

Friday 7 September 2018

Prigogine Award 2018 Ceremony

The 2018 Prigogine Gold Medal was awarded to Professor Stuart Kauffman, University of Pennsylvania, USA.

The Prigogine Gold Medal 2018 Award Ceremony took place at the University of Siena on Tuesday 4th September 2018, during the first day of the 10th International Conference on Sustainable Development and Planning (SDP).

The Prigogine Medal was established by the University of Siena and the Wessex Institute of Technology in 2004 to honour the memory of Professor Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry.

ILYA PRIGOGINE
Ilya Prigogine was born in Moscow in 1917, and obtained his undergraduate and graduate education in chemistry at the Free University in Brussels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures. The main theme of his scientific work was the role of time in the physical sciences and biology. He contributed significantly to the understanding of irreversible processes, particularly in systems far from equilibrium. The results of his work have had profound consequences for understanding biological and ecological systems.
Prigogine’s ideas established the basis for ecological systems research. The Prigogine Medal to honour his memory is awarded annually to a leading scientist in the field of ecological systems. All recipients have been deeply influenced by the work of Prigogine.

Previous Prigogine Laureates:
2004 Sven Jorgensen, Denmark
2005 Enzo Tiezzi, Italy
2006 Bernard Patten, USA
2007 Robert Ulanowicz, USA
2008 Ioannis Antoniou, Greece
2009 Emilio del Giudice, Italy
2010 Felix Müller, Germany
2011 Larissa Brizhik, Ukraine
2012 Gerald Pollack, USA
2013 Vladimir Voeikov, Russia
2014 Mae-wan Ho, UK
2015 Bai-Lian Larry Li, USA
2016 Brian Fath, USA
2017 João Carlos Marques, Portugal

The 2018 Medal was awarded to Professor Stuart Kauffman, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute for Systems Biology.

STUART KAUFFMANStuart Kauffman
Professor Stuart Kauffman is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He was a professor the Universities of Chicago, Pennsylvania and Calgary. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute for Systems Biology. He has a number of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Wiener Medal.

He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organisation and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection as discussed in his book Origins of Order (1993). In 1967 and 1969 Kauffman used random boolean networks to investigate generic self-organising properties of gene regulatory networks. Using these models, he proposed that cell types are dynamical attractors in gene regulatory networks and that cell differentiation can be understood as transitions between attractors. Recent evidence suggests that cell types in humans and other organisms are attractors. In 1971 he suggested that a zygote may not be able to access all the cell type attractors in its gene regulatory network during development and that some of the developmentally inaccessible cell types might be cancer cell types. This suggested the possibility of "cancer differentiation therapy". He also proposed the self-organised emergence of collectively autocatalytic sets of polymers, specifically peptides, for the origin of molecular reproduction, which have found experimental support.

SPECIAL PRIGOGINE LECTURE
on
A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life
delivered by Professor Stuart Kauffman at the University of Siena, Italy, Spain

The emergence and evolution of life is based on physics but is beyond physics. Evolution is an historical process arising from the non-ergodicity of the universe above the level of atoms. Most complex things will never exist. Human hearts exist. Prebiotic chemistry saw the evolution of many organic molecules in complex reaction networks, and the formation of low energy structures such as membranes. Theory and experiments suggest that from this, the spontaneous emergence of self reproducing molecular systems could arise and evolve. Such “collectively autocatalytic systems” cyclically link non-equilibrium processes whose constrained release of energy constitutes “work” to construct the same constraints on those non-equilibrium processes. Cells yoke a set of non-equilibrium processes and constraints on the energy released as work to build their own constraints and reproduce.

Such systems are living, and can propagate their organization with heritable variations, so can be subject to natural selection. In this evolution, these proto-organisms emerge unprestatably, and afford novel niches enabling, not causing, further types of proto-organisms to emerge. With this, unprestatable new functions arise. The ever-changing phase space of evolution includes these functionalities. Since we cannot prestate these ever new functionalities, we can write no laws of motion for this evolution, which is therefor entailed by no laws at all, and thus not reducible to physics. Beyond entailing law, the evolving biosphere literally constructs itself and is the most complex system we know in the universe.

For further information about the Prigogine Awards, please contact:

Wessex Institute of Technology
Ashurst Lodge, Ashurst
Southampton
SO40 7AA, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 238 029 3223
Fax: +44 (0) 238 029 2853
Email: wit@wessex.ac.uk

See the following Web pages for details of recent Prigogine Awards:
Further details of all Prigogine Awards can be found on our dedicated page: Prigogine Award