Scientific Computing

Faculty

Marsha Berger   Michael Overton   Olof Widlund   Margaret Wright

Description

Scientific Computing has a long tradition at the Courant Institute, which was founded by Richard Courant at the dawn of the computer era. Electronic computers were invented in the late 1940's and early 1950's for exactly one purpose: solving hard scientific and engineering problems which required too much numerical computation to do by hand. The phenomenal development of computers in the last 50 years has been accompanied by an equally rapid development in the field of scientific computing. Now, virtually all branches of science and engineering rely heavily on computing. The traditional two branches of science are theoretical science and experimental science. Computational science is now often mentioned as a third branch, having a status which is essentially equal, perhaps even eclipsing, that of its two older siblings. The availability of greatly improved computational techniques and immensely faster computers have made it possible to solve complicated problems which would have seemed impossible just a generation ago.

Scientific Computing is the discipline that studies how to solve a wide variety of problems arising in science and engineering by computational techniques. Sometimes it is said to rest on four A's: Analysis, Algorithms, Architecture, and Applications. Many faculty at Courant, both in the Computer Science and Mathematics Departments, have strong interests in Scientific Computing, both in specific application areas and in general techniques and analysis that have broad applicability.

Research Interests

Marsha J. Berger	Computational fluid dynamics, large-scale parallel computing, adaptive methods in complex geometries.
Michael L. Overton	Optimization, semidefinite programming, convex and nonconvex programming.
Olof B. Widlund	Finite element methods, partial differential equations, domain decomposition.
Margaret H. Wright	Optimization, linear algebra, numerical analysis, scientific computing, and scientific and engineering applications.

Affiliated Mathematics Faculty

Yu Chen   Jonathan Goodman   Leslie Greengard   Michael Shelley

Related Projects

Courant Math and Computing Laboratory (CMCL)