Princeton University alumnus David Donoho, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of statistics at Stanford University, today was named the 2013 Shaw Laureate in mathematics. Awarded by the Hong Kong-based Shaw Foundation, the Shaw Prize honors recent breakthroughs by active researchers in the fields of mathematics, astronomy and life and medical sciences.
Donoho, a member of Princeton's Class of 1978, was recognized for his work to get a more detailed analysis out of large numerical data sets. Specifically, the prize citation noted his "profound contributions to modern mathematical statistics and in particular the development of optimal algorithms for statistical estimation in the presence of noise and of efficient techniques for sparse representation and recovery in large data sets."
Donoho graduated from Princeton with a bachelor's degree in statistics and completed his doctorate at Harvard University in 1983. Donoho joined the Stanford faculty in 1990 after six years on the faculty of the University of California-Berkeley.
In addition, Steven Balbus, who shared the 2013 Shaw Prize in astronomy, was a Princeton postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics before joining the University of Virginia faculty in 1985. In 2010, Balbus served as the department's Bohdan Paczynski faculty visitor.
The Shaw Prize was founded in 2002 by media mogul and philanthropist Run Run Shaw and includes a $1 million award. The 2010 Shaw Prize in astronomy went to Princeton faculty members Lyman Page, the Henry De Wolf Smyth Professor of Physics, and David Spergel, the Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation, for their leadership of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experiment.
