Douglas N. Arnold

Douglas N. Arnold is Director of IMA, the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, and, from July 2008, McKnight Presidential Endowed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota. The primary mission of the IMA is to increase the impact of mathematics by fostering interdisciplinary research linking mathematics with important scientific and technological problems from other disciplines and industry. The IMA is a partnership of the National Science Foundation, the University of Minnesota, and a consortium of participating universities, laboratories, and corporations, and represents the largest mathematics research investment of the National Science Foundation.

In 2008, Prof. Arnold serves as the President-elect of SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. SIAM is the primary professional organization for applied mathematicians and computational scientists in the U.S. and, increasingly, throughout the world. He will serve a two-year term as president beginning at the start of 2009, followed by a year as past president.

Prof. Arnold's research interests include numerical analysis, partial differential equations, mechanics, and in particular, the interplay between these fields. Much of his work concerns the computer solution of partial differential equations, focusing on the development and understanding of methods for simulating physical phenomena ranging from the deformation of elastic plates and shells to the collision of black holes. Around 2002 he initiated the finite element exterior calculus, a new approach to the stability of finite element methods based on geometric and topological structure underlying the relevant partial differential equations. The development of the finite element exterior calculus is a major direction of his current research work.

Prof. Arnold received his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1979. From 1979 through 1989 he was on the faculty of the University of Maryland. In 1989 he moved to Penn State University where he was appointed Distinguished Professor Mathematics, and where he remained until assuming the position of Director at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications in August 2001, which he will hold through June 2008.

Arnold has written about 80 papers, serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals, and has been designated as a Highly Cited Author by Thomson ISI. In 1991 he was awarded the first International Giovanni Sacchi Landriani Prize by the Academy of Arts and Letters of Lombardy Institute in Milan in 1991 for "outstanding contributions to the field of numerical methods for partial differential equations." In 2002 he was a plenary lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. In 2008 he was awarded a Guggenhein Fellowship. Arnold serves or has served on a variety of advisory and scientific boards, including the U.S. National Committee for Mathematics, the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation, the Program Committee for the International Congress of Mathematicians, and the scientific boards of DIMACS, the Centre of Mathematics for Applications in Oslo, and the Maxwell Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh. At Penn State he was awarded the George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching by the University in 1996, the Teresa Cohen Service Award by the Mathematics Department in 1998, and the Distinguished Service Award by the Eberly College of Science in 2000. There he also served as co-director of the Center for Computational Mathematics and Applications and as associate director of the Institute for High Performance Computing Applications, and was a member of the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry.

curriculum vitae