Who I am

After having studied in Stuttgart and Heidelberg (Germany); a Ph.D. in Heidelberg; a stop at ETH Zürich (Switzerland); a postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin (with joint positions at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and the Institute for Geophysics); and eleven years as a Professor of Mathematics at Texas A&M University, I am now a professor in the Department of Mathematics and a professor (by courtesy) in the Department of Geosciences at Colorado State University. I am also a co-Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS).

I consider myself a computational scientist. My field of work is developing methods and widely usable software for the numerical solution of partial differential equations by the finite element method – or, in different words: I develop the mathematical and software tools for simulating how solids, fluids, and gases move and deform. If you are interested in more about this, check out the links at the top of this page.

Finite element software

The concrete realization of my work is software. This includes deal.II, a finite element software library written in C++. I am the founder and, with others, principal author and maintainer of this open source library

deal.II is used by several hundred researchers around the world and is part of the computing industry standard SPEC CPU2006 and SPEC CPU2017 benchmarks. My co-authors and I have received the J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software for its creation. It has been used for numerical results in about 1,800 scientific papers covering practically all areas of the sciences and engineering.

I wrote the basic blocks of this library in 1998 for my thesis, but it has been greatly extended since, by me and around 300 others around the world. It now has about 1,400,000 lines of code, and extensive documentation.

I am also a principal author of ASPECT, an open source code for thermal convection with primary application to the simulation of convection in the Earth mantle. ASPECT is the basis of the integrated earth project of which I am the Principal Investigator.

Contact

Email bangerth @ colostate.edu
Office Weber 214
Cell phone ++1 (512) 689 7194
Mail address Wolfgang Bangerth
Department of Mathematics
1874 Campus Delivery
Fort Collins, CO 80523-1874
USA