John A. Adam (mathematician)

Adam is a 1971 graduate, with first-class honours, from Queen Elizabeth College. He completed his Ph.D. in 1974 at University College London.[1][2] His dissertation, A Theoretical Study of Magnetohydrodynamic Processes in Solar Active Regions, was jointly supervised by astrochemist Gillian Peach and astrophysicist Carole Jordan.[3]

After working as a researcher in theoretical astronomy and applied mathematics, respectively at the University of Sussex and University of St Andrews, he became a lecturer in mathematics at the New University of Ulster in 1978, while also taking a research affiliation at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. In 1983 he came to the US as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Rochester, and in 1984 he moved to Old Dominion University. He was named University Professor there in 1999.[1][2]

Adam is the author of books including:

• A Survey of Models for Tumor-Immune System Dynamics (edited with Nicola Bellomo, Springer, 1997)[4]
• Mathematics in Nature: Modeling Patterns in the Natural World (Princeton University Press, 2003)[5]
• Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin (with Lawrence Weinstein, Princeton University Press, 2008)[6]
• A Mathematical Nature Walk (Princeton University Press, 2009)[7]
• X and the City: Modeling Aspects of Urban Life (Princeton University Press, 2012)[8]
• Rays, Waves, and Scattering: Topics in Classical Mathematical Physics (Princeton University Press, 2017)[9]

In 2007, the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) gave Adam their Outstanding Faculty Award.[10]

In 2012, Adam won the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award of the Mathematical Association of America for an exposition of blood vessel modeling.[11]

• Home page