Layne Watson honored among 2024 class of SIAM fellows

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) has named Layne Watson, a professor in three departments at Virginia Tech - computer science, mathematics, and aerospace and ocean engineering - and core faculty at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, part of the 26-member 2024 class of SIAM fellows. 

SIAM is an international community of more than 1,400 individual members and nearly 500 academic, manufacturing, research and development, service and consulting organizations, government, and military are institutional members. Members are nominated to the fellowship program in recognition of their outstanding research and service to the community. Through their various contributions, SIAM fellows form a crucial group of individuals helping to advance the fields of applied mathematics, computational science, and data science.

A SIAM member since 1976, Watson is being recognized particularly for pioneering the theoretical development, algorithm design, software implementation, and application of homotopy methods. Homotopy theory is part of topology, a branch of theoretical mathematics.

He has contributed to computer science in 12 Association for Computing Machinery Transactions on Mathematical Software Algorithms — reviewed and published computer programs — each of which is the culmination of three to five years of work with one of his Ph.D. students. His work runs the gamut from theoretical mathematical existence proofs to practical, robust computer code for real science and engineering problems.

“Layne has been a cornerstone of the department for more than 40 years,” said Cal Ribbens, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science. “His advice and example for students and faculty have been invaluable. This outstanding recognition from SIAM is highly deserved.”

Dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach, Watson has collaborated with faculty and students from nearly every engineering and science department and college at Virginia Tech, which accounts for his professorship appointments in three departments and publications in science, engineering, agriculture, and medical journals.

Watson has worked for United States Naval Ammunition Depot Crane, Sandia National Laboratories, and General Motors Research Laboratories and served on the faculties of the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, East Lansing, before coming to Virginia Tech in 1978.

He was appointed Visiting Melchor Chair Professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame in 2008 and a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia from 2016-20.

His professional service includes positions as associate editor of Operations Research Society of America's Journal on Computing; SIAM's Journal on Optimization, Computational Optimization and Applications, Evolutionary Optimization, Engineering Computations, and the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. He was a senior editor of Applied Mathematics and Computation, and served as general chair or program chair for the High Performance Computing Symposium in the Society for Computer Simulation Spring Simulation Conference for 20 years.

He is a life fellow of the IEEE, has edited 10 books, and published well over 350 refereed journal articles and 250 refereed conference papers.

In 1969, he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Evansville, Indiana, with a degree in psychology and mathematics and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1974.