Leon Simon

Leon Simon is a Bocher Prize-winning mathematician. He is currently Professor in the Mathematics Department at Stanford University.

Leon Simon, born July 6, 1945, received his B.Sc from the University of Adelaide in 1967, and his Ph.D. in 1971 from the same institution, under the direction of James H Michael. His doctoral thesis was titled Interior Gradient Bounds for Non-Uniformly Elliptic Equations. He was employed from 1968 to 1971 as a Tutor in Mathematics by the University.

Simon has since held a variety of academic positions. He worked first at Flinders University as a lecturer, then at Australian National University as a professor, at the University of Melbourne, the University of Minnesota, at ETH Zurich, and at Stanford. He first came to Stanford in 1973 as Visiting Assistant Professor and was awarded a full professorship in 1986. He has authored several mathematics textbooks, including Lectures on Geometric Measure Theory and An Introduction to Multivariable Mathematics. He published Theorems on regularity and singularity of energy minimizing maps in 1996, based in part on lectures he gave at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich. In the same year, he was awarded the Bocher Memorial Prize. The Bocher Prize is awarded every five years to a groundbreaking author in analysis; its previous recipients include John von Neumann and Richard Schoen (one of Dr. Simon's doctoral advisees), and its more recent recipients include Terence Tao.

Simon has 77 'mathematical descendents' according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project.