James Sethian

James Albert Sethian ( born May 10, 1954 in Washington, DC) is an American applied mathematician.

Sethian received his doctorate in 1982 at the University of California, Berkeley, Alexandre Chorin. He then as a post-doc at Peter Lax at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University was. From 1985, he was back as an assistant professor at Berkeley, where he is a professor today. At the same time, he headed the Mathematics Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Sethian is with Stanley Osher pioneered the introduction of the level-set method for the description of moving surfaces and fronts that he and others on the problem of breaking waves on beaches, tumor growth, and image processing in medicine, for the shape of soap bubbles snowflakes, inkjet printer and was to use in semiconductor manufacturing. He also dealt with the inverse problem in seismology. With Adalsteinsson he developed adaptive methods for level set methods, which concentrate on numerical calculations of the propagating front ( Adaptive Narrow Band Level Set Method).

Even before his work with Osher he developed in the 1980s, numerical methods for the propagation of the front surfaces and curves, for example, in combustion processes ( the subject of his dissertation, 1982).

With Alexander Vladimirsky he developed Dijkstra -like Fast marching method for solving the Hamilton -Jacobi equation, with applications in image processing ( with Ravikanth Malladi ), propagation of seismic waves ( with Mihai Popovici ), robot navigation ( with Ron Kimmel 1996). With Sergey Fomel he developed Escape Arrival Methods in seismology.

In 2008 he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2004 he received the Norbert Wiener Prize for Applied Mathematics of the American Mathematical Society and SIAM. In 2002 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing (Fast algorithms for optimal control, anisotropic front propagation and multiple arrivals ). He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Writings

• With Karl Gustafson (Editor): Vortex Methods and Vortex Motion, SIAM 1991
• Level Set Methods: Evolving Interfaces in Geometry, Fluid Mechanics, Computer Vision and Materials Sciences, Cambridge University Press, first edition 1996, new edition 1999 Level Set Methods and Fast Marching Methods
• Level Set Method: An Act of Violence, American Scientist, May / June 1997
• Fast Marching Methods, SIAM Review, Vol 41, 1999, S.199 -235