I will give a very personal overview of the evolution of mainstream applied mathematics from the early 60's onwards. This era started pre computer with mostly analytic techniques, followed by linear stability analysis for finite difference approximations, to shock waves, to image processing, to the motion of fronts and interfaces, to compressive sensing and the associated optimization challenges, to the use of sparsity in Schrodinger's equation and other PDE's, to overcoming the curse of dimensionality in parts of control theory and in solving the associated high dimensional Hamilton-Jacobi equations.
