Professor Temam's interests are in the fields of Applied Mathematics, in particular the modeling and description of complex natural phenomena and the utilization of computers for the numerical simulation of such phenomena. This includes continuum mechanics, especially fluid mechanics and the understanding of turbulence and chaos arising in fluid flows, from the laboratory size to the geophysical size. The mathematical tools in which he specializes are functional analysis, numerical analysis, optimization theory and the theory of partial differential equations.

Professor Temam has written over 300 articles published in professional journals. He is the author of eleven books, five written by himself and six co-authored. He serves on the editorial board of about twenty international professional journals, either as editor or as associate editor.

Professor Temam was awarded several prizes, including the Seymour Cray Prize in Numerical Simulation in 1989, and three prizes from the French Academy of Sciences in 1977, 1993 and 2003. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in December 2007. He is also the most prolific thesis adviser in mathematics according to the web site of the Mathematics Genealogy Project: http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/extrema.php

He is a member of several professional organizations, including the American Mathematical Society, the American Physical Society, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and the New York Academy of Sciences. Professor Temam is director, since 1986, of the Institute for Scientific Computing and Applied Mathematics at Indiana University, Bloomington.