About Andrew

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Andrew Joseph Majda was born in East Chicago, Indiana on January 30th 1949. He received a B.S. in Mathematics from Purdue University in 1970 before earning his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at Stanford University. Andy first joined our Institute as a Courant Instructor from 1973-1975. He returned in 1994 as the Samuel F. B. Morse Professor of Arts and Sciences in the Mathematics Department, and he remained here at Courant for the rest of his career. Andy was a beloved teacher and a devoted advisor to thirty doctoral students. He was also instrumental in the founding of the Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science (CAOS), which aims to improve climate modeling and prediction through cross-disciplinary research.

As a pioneering applied mathematician, Andy’s work spanned a number of diverse areas such as partial differential equations, asymptotic methods, scattering theory, shock waves, combustion, vortex motion, turbulent diffusion, and atmosphere ocean science. Majda made a number of seminal contributions to these fields, such as: absorbing boundary conditions for the numerical simulation of waves, the Beale-Kato-Majda theorem, an instructive model of dispersive wave turbulence, rigorous renormalization group theory for turbulent diffusion, the existence and stability of multidimensional shock fronts, the derivation of multi-scale models in the tropics, the derivation of a sub-grid-scale model of clouds and convection, the analysis of the Madden–Julian oscillation, just to name a few. He was a prolific author, with eight published books and hundreds of academic papers to his name.

Andy received consistent scientific recognition throughout his impressive career. He was a plenary speaker at the first ever International Conference of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) in Paris in 1987. In 2016, Andy received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for seminal contribution to research from the American Mathematical Society (AMS). He was also awarded the Medal of the College de France (1982 and 2007), the John von Neumann Prize (1990), the Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics (2013), and the Lagrange Prize (2015). Professor Majda was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In January of 2021, Andy retired from the Courant Institute and was named Professor Emeritus. He passed away a few months later on March 12th. Andy is survived by his wife Gerta Keller, a Professor of Paleontology and Geology at Princeton University. Professor Majda is fondly remembered by students, colleagues, and friends within the mathematical community he helped to create.