James Sethian
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James Albert Sethian is a professor of
mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...
at the
University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...
and the head of the Mathematics Grou

at the United States Department of Energy, United States Department of Energy's
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley Lab) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in the Berkeley Hills, hills of Berkeley, California, United States. Established i ...
. Sethian was born in
Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...
, on May 10, 1954. He received a B.A. (1976) from
Princeton Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the Unit ...
and a M.A. (1978) and Ph.D (1982) from
Berkeley Berkeley most often refers to: *Berkeley, California, a city in the United States **University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California *George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley may also refer to ...
under the direction of Alexandre Chorin. Beginning in 1983, he was a
National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...
postdoctoral fellow, lastly at the
Courant Institute The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (commonly known as Courant or CIMS) is the mathematics research school of New York University (NYU). Founded in 1935, it is named after Richard Courant, one of the founders of the Courant Institute ...
under
Peter Lax Peter David Lax (1 May 1926 – 16 May 2025) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and Abel Prize laureate working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics. Lax made important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics an ...
. In 1985, he returned to Berkeley to join the mathematics faculty, where he is currently a full professor. Sethian was elected member of the
National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...
in 2008 as well as the
National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...
in 2013. Sethian has acted as Interim Director Research at
Thinking Machines Corporation Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and Danny Hillis, W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at th ...
and held visiting positions at the
National Center for Atmospheric Research The US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR ) is a US federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and funded by the National Science Foundat ...
and the
National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into Outline of p ...
.


Work

Sethian has worked on numerical algorithms for tracking moving interfaces for over three decades, starting with his seminal 1982 work on curve and surface propagation in combustion, and his 1985 work on entropy conditions, curvature, stability of numerical algorithms. This work led to development of the level-set method in 1988, which was developed jointly with
Stanley Osher Stanley Osher (born April 24, 1942) is an American mathematician, known for his many contributions in shock capturing, level-set methods, and PDE-based methods in computer vision and image processing. Osher is a professor at the University of ...
. These are numerical algorithms for tracking moving interfaces in complex situations, and have proved instrumental in a wide collection of applications, including semiconductor processing,
fluid mechanics Fluid mechanics is the branch of physics concerned with the mechanics of fluids (liquids, gases, and plasma (physics), plasmas) and the forces on them. Originally applied to water (hydromechanics), it found applications in a wide range of discipl ...
,
medical imaging Medical imaging is the technique and process of imaging the interior of a body for clinical analysis and medical intervention, as well as visual representation of the function of some organs or tissues (physiology). Medical imaging seeks to revea ...
,
computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. ...
, and
materials science Materials science is an interdisciplinary field of researching and discovering materials. Materials engineering is an engineering field of finding uses for materials in other fields and industries. The intellectual origins of materials sci ...
. Jointly with D. Adalsteinsson, Sethian then introduced the idea of adaptivity to level set methods, in which computational labor is focused on the evolving front: their Adaptive Narrow Band level set method and its variants are what makes level set methods efficient and practical, and are the most common form of these techniques in practice today. Together with Andreas Wiegmann, Sethian pioneered the use of the Level-set method and the Immersed-interface method in the field of Topology optimization. Together with Alexander Vladimirsky, Sethian developed a class of Dijkstra-like ordered upwind methods for solving static
Hamilton–Jacobi equation In physics, the Hamilton–Jacobi equation, named after William Rowan Hamilton and Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, is an alternative formulation of classical mechanics, equivalent to other formulations such as Newton's laws of motion, Lagrangian mecha ...
s. In the case of an Eikonal equation, the first method to do so was developed by Jon N. Tsitsiklis using a control-theoretic approach: followed shortly by Sethian's work on high-order finite-difference Dijkstra-like Fast Marching Methods. Ravikanth Malladi and Sethian pioneered the application of these techniques to image segmentation, Ron Kimmel and Sethian introduced them to robotic navigation and extended them to curved domains, and Mihai Popovici and Sethian were the first to use them as fast wave solvers in geophysical seismic imaging. Together with Sergey Fomel, Sethian invented Escape Arrival Methods for computing multiple arrivals in wave propagation and geophysical imaging. Algorithms based on the work of Sethian and his colleagues are now commonly used throughout science and engineering. Examples include informing engineers how to design more precise ink jet plotters, allowing physicians to analyze brain and cardiac images, aiding oil companies in locating petroleum reserves, and telling process engineers how to build reliable computer chips. He maintains the "level set methods and fast marching methods" webpag

which is a popular resource for these methods, and provides a variety of applets, movies, and explanations for both the popular and technical audiences.


Awards

Sethian won th
ICIAM Pioneer Prize
in 2011 for pioneering work, introducing applied mathematical methods and scientific computing techniques to an industrial problem area and new scientific fields of applications. Sethian was elected member of the
National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...
in 2008 for the development of efficient methods of tracking moving interfaces. He received the
Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics The Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics is a $5000 prize awarded, every three years, for an outstanding contribution to "applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense." It was endowed in 1967 in honor of Norbert Wiener by MIT's mat ...
in 2004, jointly awarded by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematicians (SIAM) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). This prize was awarded "for an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense." Sethian was honoured "for his seminal work on the computer representation of the motion of curves, surfaces, interfaces, and wave fronts, and for his brilliant applications of mathematical and computational ideas to problems in science and engineering." Previous recipients include
Richard Bellman Richard Ernest Bellman (August 26, 1920 – March 19, 1984) was an American applied mathematician, who introduced dynamic programming in 1953, and made important contributions in other fields of mathematics, such as biomathematics. He foun ...
,
Peter Lax Peter David Lax (1 May 1926 – 16 May 2025) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and Abel Prize laureate working in the areas of pure and applied mathematics. Lax made important contributions to integrable systems, fluid dynamics an ...
, Alexandre Chorin, Jerrold Marsden, Tosio Kato, Gerald Whitham, Arthur Winfree, and Harold Widom. Sethian, in collaboration with Robert Saye, won th
Cozzarelli Prize
of the ''
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Scie ...
'' in 2012 for the best paper published that year in engineering and applied sciences in that journal. In 2012 he became a fellow of the
American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...
.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2013-07-18. In addition he has received the
SIAM Thailand, officially the Kingdom of Thailand and historically known as Siam (the official name until 1939), is a country in Southeast Asia on the Mainland Southeast Asia, Indochinese Peninsula. With a population of almost 66 million, it spa ...
I.E. Block Community Lecture Prize.


Books

* ''Vortex Methods and Vortex Motion'' * ''Level Set Methods: Evolving Interfaces in Geometry, Fluid Mechanics, Computer Vision and Materials Sciences'' * ''Level Set Methods and Fast Marching Methods''


References


External links


Berkeley Lab Mathematicians Awarded Prestigious Math PrizesAdvancing the science of advancing interfaces
at
United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and energy production, the research and development of nuclear power, the military's nuclear w ...

Sethian's home page
at Berkeley *



in real-world medical imaging applications. {{DEFAULTSORT:Sethian, James Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians University of California, Berkeley alumni Princeton University alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty 1954 births Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering