James Sethian

James Sethian
Photographed by Adalien Hulmer (2004)
Born	(1954-05-10) May 10, 1954 (age 63) Washington, D.C., United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	UCB, Courant Inst. Princeton Univ.
Doctoral advisor	Alexandre Chorin, Peter Lax
Known for	Level set method Fast marching method Image segmentation Applied mathematics
Notable awards	Norbert Wiener Prize (2004), ICIAM Pionner Prize (2011)

James Albert Sethian (born 10 May 1954) is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the head of the Mathematics Group [1] at the United States Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

He received his Ph.D from Berkeley in 1982 under the direction of Alexandre Chorin. Afterward he was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Courant Institute, under Peter Lax. He returned to Berkeley in 1985 where he is now a full professor. Sethian was elected member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2008 as well as the National Academy of Sciences in 2013. Sethian has acted as Interim Director Research at Thinking Machines Corporation, as well as held visiting positions at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Sethian has worked on numerical algorithms for tracking moving interfaces for over three decades, starting with his seminal 1982 work on curve and surface propagation in combustion, and his 1985 work on entropy conditions, curvature, stability of numerical algorithms. This work led to development of the level set method in 1988, which was developed jointly with Stanley Osher.

These are numerical algorithms for tracking moving interfaces in complex situations, and have proved instrumental in a wide collection of applications, including semiconductor processing, fluid mechanics, medical imaging, computer graphics, and material sciences.