Peter Olver is a professor in the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and former Department Head (2008--2020). His research interests revolve around the applications of symmetry and Lie groups to differential equations. Over the years, he has contributed to a wide range of fields, including computer vision and image processing, mathematical physics, fluid mechanics, elasticity, quantum mechanics, the calculus of variations, geometric numerical methods, differential geometry, classical invariant theory, and elsewhere.
Since 1976, he has given more than 500 invited lectures on his research at conferences, universities, colleges, and institutes throughout the world. He is the author of over 150 papers in refereed journals, and was named a “Highly Cited Researcher” by Thomson-ISI in 2003. He has written 5 books, including the definitive text on Applications of Lie Groups to Differential Equations, and two undergraduate texts on Partial Differential Equations and on Applied Linear Algebra, the latter coauthored with his wife Cheri Shakiban. In 2014, he became a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for “developing new geometric methods for differential equations leading to applications in fluid mechanics, elasticity, quantum mechanics, and image processing”. He is also a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and of the Institute of Physics.