Jerry Marsden Elected to Royal Society

PASADENA, Calif.—Jerry Marsden, the Carl F. Braun Professor of Engineering and Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology, has been named a member of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom. Marsden joins 43 other scientists as the new inductees of a society that through the years has counted Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking among its members.

Marsden was cited by the Royal Society for "his fundamental contributions to a very wide range of topics such as Hamiltonian systems, fluid mechanics, plasma physics, general relativity, dynamical systems and chaos, nonlinear elasticity, nonholonomic mechanics, control theory, variational integrators and solar system mission design. Some of his recent research has contributed to understanding and designing NASA missions to the moons of Jupiter."

Marsden earned his bachelor's degree in applied mathematics from the University of Toronto and his doctorate in applied mathematics from Princeton University. He taught at UC Berkeley from 1968 to 1995 and then came to Caltech as a professor of control and dynamical systems, becoming the Carl F. Braun Professor in 2003. In the early 1970s, he was one of the original founders of reduction theory for mechanical systems with symmetry. Marsden received the 1990 AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize and the SIAM John von Neumann Prize in 2005. He is also a recipient of the Research Award for Natural Sciences of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1992 and 1999 and the 2000 Max Planck Research Award for Mathematics and Computer Science.

The Royal Society was established in England in 1660 and is the world's oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. The society's objectives are to recognize excellence in science, to support leading-edge scientific research and its applications, to stimulate international interaction, and to promote education and the public's understanding of science.