John Guckenheimer, Cornell professor of mathematics and of theoretical and applied mechanics, was selected president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). He will begin his two-year term in January 1997.

Guckenheimer also is director of research at the Cornell Theory Center (CTC) and director of the Center for Applied Mathematics. His selection was a "singular honor, well deserved," according to Malvin H. Kalos, director of the Theory Center.

"I feel honored to be elected President of SIAM," Guckenheimer said. "The influence of mathematics on other disciplines has been increasing, often through computational methods. This is a particularly exciting time for applied mathematics as mathematicians are devoting more attention to their interactions with other disciplines." SIAM began in 1951 as a small group of professionals from industry and academe that met periodically to exchange ideas about the uses of mathematics in industry. The society's goals are to promote mathematical research that might lead to effective new methods and techniques for science and industry, to advance the application of these methods and to provide for the exchange of information and ideas among mathematicians, engineers and scientists.

Guckenheimer received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1966 and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970. He taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz for 12 years before moving to Cornell in 1985. His research interests have centered on the theory of dynamical systems and applications of this theory to population biology, fluid dynamics, chemistry and neurobiology. He was a contributor to the theory of "chaos" since before the term was invented. With Philip Holmes, he is author of one of the basic reference works in the subject.

For the past several years, he has emphasized the creation of new computational tools for the study of dynamical systems that occur in models of physical and biological phenomena. The resulting software gives the user efficient point-and- click control over a complex suite of computational algorithms for simulating and analyzing the behavior of dynamical systems.

CTC, one of four high performance computing and communications centers supported by the National Science Foundation, operates the world's largest IBM SP system. Activities of the center are also funded by New York state, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health, IBM, and other members of CTC's Corporate Partnership Program.