Steven Orszag

Steven Alan Orszag (February 27, 1943 – May 1, 2011) was an American mathematician.

Life and career Orszag was born to a Jewish family in Manhattan, the son of Joseph Orszag, a lawyer. Orszag's paternal grandparents were emigrants from Hungary. He did post graduate study at Cambridge University and in 1966 graduated with a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University. In 1984, he was appointed Forrest E Hamrick Professor of Engineering at Princeton University. In 1998, he accepted a position at Yale University and in 2000, from 2000 until his death in 2011. the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Fluid and Plasmadynamics Award, the Otto Laporte Award of the American Physical Society, and the Society of Engineering Science's G. I. Taylor Medal.

Orszag specialized in fluid dynamics, especially turbulence, computational physics and mathematics, electronic chip manufacturing, computer storage system design, and other topics in scientific computing. His work included the development of spectral methods, pseudo-spectral methods, direct numerical simulations, renormalization group methods for turbulence, and very-large-eddy simulations. He was the founder of and/or chief scientific adviser to a number of companies, including Flow Research, Ibrix (now part of HPQ), Vector Technologies, and Exa Corp. He has been awarded 6 patents and has written over 400 archival papers.

With Carl M. Bender he wrote Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers: Asymptotic Methods and Perturbation Theory, a standard text on mathematical methods for scientists. Orszag has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.

Personal life In 1964, he married Reba Karp (sister of Joel Karp, they had three sons: Michael, Peter, and Jonathan.