Halil Mete Soner

Halil Mete Soner is a Turkish mathematician. He was born in Eskişehir to an officer family.

After graduating from the Ankara Science High School, he attended the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, but had to leave it due to terror situation He was educated at the Bogazici University, Istanbul from 1977, and received a B.Sc. in mathematics and another in electrical engineering simultaneously in 1981, both in first-rank. Soner attended then the Brown University in Providence, RI, USA on a research fellowship. Following his M.Sc. degree in applied mathematics in 1983, he received his Ph.D. in 1986 in the same branch.

In 1985, Soner was research associate at the Institute for Mathematics and Applied Sciences in Minneapolis, MN and, assistant professor and then professor between 1986-1998 in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. During 1997-1998 he was Research Associate at the Feza Gursey Institute for Basic Sciences in Istanbul and visiting professor of Mathematics at the Bogazici University, Istanbul and the University of Paris, Paris, France. From 1998 for two years, Soner was “Paul M. Whythes `55” Professor of Finance and Engineering in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at the Princeton University in Princeton, NJ.

In 2000, Soner returned to Turkey to join the Koc University in Istanbul as Professor of Mathematics and Finance in the Department of Mathematics. Since 2002 he is Dean of the College of Administrative Sciences and Economics at the same university.

Soner co-authored a book, with Wendell Fleming, on viscosity solutions and stochastic control; Controlled Markov Processes and Viscosity Solutions ( Springer-Verlag) in 1993, and authored or co-authored articles on nonlinear partial differential equations, viscosity solutions, stochastic optimal control and mathematical finance.

He is elected to the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TUBA), in December 2001, and received the TUBITAK-TWAS Science award in 2002.

Soner’s current research interests are nonlinear partial differential equations; asymptotic analysis of Ginzburg-Landau type systems, viscosity solutions, and mathematical finance.

He is married to Serpil. They have a son Mehmet Ali.