The Philippe Tondeur Dissertation Prize was established to recognize students in their final year of the Mathematics PhD program, and was made possible by the generosity of Professor Emeritus Philippe Tondeur and his wife Claire-Lise Tondeur.

Philippe Tondeur’s research is in differential geometry, topology, and partial differential equations. He is an influential advocate for mathematics and science policy at the national and international levels. He earned an engineering degree in Zurich, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Zurich. He subsequently was a Research Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Paris, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and an Associate Professor at Wesleyan University, before joining our department in 1968. He served as Chair of the department from 1996–1999, and then as Director of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1999–2002.

Tondeur was an Invited Hour Speaker of the AMS in 1976. He has received a 1985 Award for Study in a Second Discipline (Physics) at Illinois, the 1994 William F. Prokasy Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Illinois, a 2002 Frederick A. Howes Commendation for Public Service from SIAM, and the 2008 SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession. In 2009 he was selected in the first class of Fellows of SIAM, and in 2010 he was selected a Fellow of AAAS.

Recipients

  • 2024, Shiliang Gao and Qihang Sun
  • 2023, Hung Chu and Grigory Terlov
  • 2022, Felix Clemen
  • 2021, William Balderrama
  • 2020, Joshua Wen
  • 2019, Ruth Luo
  • 2018, Anton Bernshteyn
  • 2017, Allen Gehret
  • 2016, Meghan Galiardi and Oliver Pechenik