Gerald Beresford Whitham FRS[2] (13 December 1927 – 26 January 2014) was a British–born American applied mathematician and the Charles Lee Powell Professor of Applied Mathematics (Emeritus) of Applied & Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology.

[3] He received his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1953 under the direction of Sir James Lighthill.

He was a Faculty Member in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during 1959–1962.

[6] Whitham is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1959.

This prize was awarded "for an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense."