PHILADELPHIA, PA — The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics announced that University of Michigan professor Mark Newman will receive the 2026 John von Neumann Prize for contributions to network science and applied mathematics.
The award, SIAM’s highest honor, recognizes Newman’s research on the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of network science and their application to real-world systems.
Newman will deliver a lecture when the prize is presented at the 2026 SIAM Annual Meeting scheduled for this summer.
SIAM said Newman’s work has helped define mathematical methods for understanding the structure and behavior of networks.
His research has produced widely used algorithms for identifying network structure and measuring how it affects network dynamics.
Newman has also authored books and review papers that have helped expand the use of network science across multiple research fields.
“It’s a tremendous honor to receive this prize,” Newman said. “I see it not only as recognition of my work, but also of the growing field of network science.”
Newman earned undergraduate and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of Oxford in 1988 and 1991.
He later conducted postdoctoral research at Cornell University before joining the Santa Fe Institute.
In 2002, he joined the University of Michigan, where he is the Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics and a professor in the university’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems.
His research focuses on mathematical models and analytical methods used to study networks, including random graph models, community detection, stochastic block models, and network epidemiology.
“Ideas from network science underlie a wide range of applications, including online search and social media, bioinformatics, disease modeling, and understanding ecosystems, markets, and human society,” Newman said.
Newman is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He has also received the ISI Lagrange Prize and the APS Leo P. Kadanoff Prize.
The John von Neumann Prize was established in 1959 to recognize distinguished contributions to applied mathematics and communication of those ideas to the broader scientific community.
The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, headquartered in Philadelphia, has more than 14,000 members from over 100 countries and supports research and collaboration in applied mathematics and computational science.
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