Professor Tropp Receives the Monroe H. Martin Prize

Joel A. Tropp, Assistant Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics,  is one of two winners of the eighth Monroe H. Martin Prize competition.  The prize is awarded to an outstanding paper in applied mathematics (including numerical analysis) by a researcher who is younger than 36 years old.  Professor Tropp's winning paper is entitled "On the conditioning of random subdictionaries."

His work on random subdictionaries allows for the analysis of the performance of an important algorithm for solving a severely underdetermined linear inverse problem that arises in mathematical signal processing and related areas. His paper may be viewed as the starting point for a body of literature that studies when the inverse problem is tractable for an average-case function, rather than the worst-case functions that were previously studied.