Gleich Wins 2018 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize

04-09-2018

Writer(s): Kristyn Childres

David Gleich (Purdue’s Jyoti and Aditya Mathur associate professor of computer science) is one of three winners of the 2018 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Outstanding Paper Prize.

His paper, “PageRank Beyond the Web,” originally appeared in the SIAM Review in 2015. This prize, which is awarded to the authors of outstanding papers published in SIAM journals during a three-year period, will be presented at the 2018 SIAM Annual Meeting, held in Portland in July.

In the paper, Gleich explores how the mathematics behind Google’s PageRank algorithm can be used in many applications — from road networks to biology, bibliometrics (the measure of an author’s impact), chemistry, neuroscience, physics, sports, and computer systems.

“Although Google originally developed the PageRank method to evaluate the importance of webpages using their link structure, the mathematics of PageRank are entirely general. They apply to any graph or network in any domain,” Gleich said. “This paper is a journey through the mathematics and ideas that unite these numerous applications.”