TEACHING RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS SEMINARS PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS Personal

News: - May 20, 2009: Second SHARCNET Symposium on GPU and CELL Computing at University of Waterloo. - May 21, 2009: SHARCNET Research Day 2009 at University of Waterloo. -January 2009: grad student Killian Miller wins Student Paper Competition for Copper Mountain Conference on Multigrid Methods. - September 2008: start of new Waterloo Master's program in Computational Mathematics. - August 2007: Hans De Sterck wins Ontario's Early Researcher Award. - April 2005: our planetary atmosphere simulation paper [pdf] was published in Science (link to newspaper article in "the Record", slashdot news item, and University of Waterloo news release.) -Archived news

Hans De Sterck is Associate Professor in Computational Mathematics and Scientific Computing at the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Waterloo. He is a member of the Centre for Computational Mathematics in Industry and Commerce at the University of Waterloo, and is cross-affiliated to the Scientific Computation Group of the School of Computer Science. He is the Graduate Advisor for the new Master's program in Computational Mathematics, and he is the Waterloo Site Leader for SHARCNET. He is Associate Editor of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing.

He obtained his PhD degree at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA. Before joining the University of Waterloo in 2004, he did post-doctoral research work at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium, and in Tom Manteuffel's and Steve McCormick's Multilevel Computation group at the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The overall ambition of his research is to develop efficient mathematical techniques and scalable parallel methods for the solution of large scientific and engineering problems on the world's most powerful computational resources. In particular, he works on parallel multigrid methods for solving large systems of linear equations, finite element methods for hyperbolic PDE systems, nonlinear waves and shocks in systems of hyperbolic PDEs, and software frameworks for scientific computing on computational grids. His research finds applications in large-scale simulation for astrophysical and geophysical fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics, aerospace and mechanical engineering, and parallel bioinformatics.

New at the University of Waterloo: faculty-wide Computational Mathematics Program with new Master's degree in Computational Mathematics.

Research Topics for Prospective Students

Description of potential research topics in Computational Mathematics and Scientific Computing for prospective PhD and Master's students wanting to pursue degrees in Applied Mathematics or Computer Science, and for summer undergraduate research projects. Topics include:

• Multigrid methods for linear systems
  (applied to PDE discretizations, and to Markov chains - Google's PageRank)
  

• Numerical solution methods for PDE systems
  (hyperbolic conservation laws and computational fluid dynamics)
  

• Computational Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics
  (simulation of planetary atmospheres with supersonic outflow, and solar wind)

• Database-driven grid computing applied to biomedical problems

Teaching: Fall 2009

• CM 770: Numerical Analysis
  Syllabus.
  Lectures: WF 10:30-11:50 in RCH 212
  

• CM 452 / AMATH 442: Computational Methods for Partial Differential Equations
  Syllabus and Course description (Fall 2007).
  Lectures: MWF 2:30-3:20 in MC 2035
  

Created by Hans De Sterck.
Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada.
Phone: 1-519-888-4567 ext 37550, Fax: 1-519-746-4319, E-mail: hdesterck@math.uwaterloo.ca.
Office: MC 5016. campus map