Orszag was born to a
Jewish family in
Manhattan, the son of Joseph Orszag, a lawyer. Orszag's paternal grandparents were emigrants from
Hungary. He did post graduate study at
Cambridge University and in 1966 graduated with a Ph.D. in
astrophysics from
Princeton University. In 1984, he was appointed Forrest E Hamrick Professor of Engineering at
Princeton University. In 1998, he accepted a position at
Yale University and in 2000, from 2000 until his death in 2011. the
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Fluid and Plasmadynamics Award, the
Otto Laporte Award of the
American Physical Society, and the Society of Engineering Science's G. I. Taylor Medal. Orszag specialized in
fluid dynamics, especially turbulence,
computational physics and mathematics, electronic chip manufacturing,
computer storage system design, and other topics in
scientific computing. His work included the development of
spectral methods,
pseudo-spectral methods,
direct numerical simulations, renormalization group methods for turbulence, and very-
large-eddy simulations. He was the founder of and/or chief scientific adviser to a number of companies, including Flow Research, Ibrix (now part of HPQ), Vector Technologies, and Exa Corp. He has been awarded 6 patents and has written over 400 archival papers. With
Carl M. Bender he wrote
Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers: Asymptotic Methods and Perturbation Theory, a standard text on
mathematical methods for scientists. Orszag has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the
ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.
Personal life In 1964, he married Reba Karp (sister of
Joel Karp, they had three sons: Michael,
Peter, and
Jonathan. ==References==