Leon Simon


Leon Melvyn Simon is a Leroy P. Steele Prize and Bôcher Prize-winning mathematician. He is currently Professor Emeritus in the Mathematics Department at Stanford University.

Biography

Academic career

Leon Simon, born 6 July 1945, received his BSc from the University of Adelaide in 1967, and his PhD in 1971 from the same institution, under the direction of James H. Michael. His doctoral thesis was titled Interior Gradient Bounds for Non-Uniformly Elliptic Equations. He was employed from 1968 to 1971 as a Tutor in Mathematics by the University.
Simon has since held a variety of academic positions. He worked first at Flinders University as a lecturer, then at Australian National University as a professor, at the University of Melbourne, the University of Minnesota, at ETH Zurich, and at Stanford. He first came to Stanford in 1973 as Visiting Assistant Professor and was awarded a full professorship in 1986.

Honours

In 1983 Simon was awarded the Australian Mathematical Society Medal. In the same year he was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
In 1994, he was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize. The Bôcher Prize is awarded every five years to a groundbreaking author in analysis. In the same year he was also elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In May 2003 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2017 he was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research.

Work

Research activity

He has authored several mathematics textbooks, including the Lectures on Geometric Measure Theory and An Introduction to Multivariable Mathematics. He published the monograph Theorems on regularity and singularity of energy minimising maps in 1996, based in part on lectures he gave at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich.

Teaching activity

Simon has more than 100 'mathematical descendants', according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Among his doctoral students there is Richard Schoen, a former winner of the Bôcher Memorial Prize.