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. With my co-authors, I have received the 2007 J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software and the 2025 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering for its creation (prize lecture). It has been used for numerical results in more than 3,000 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 more than 450 others around the world. It now has about 1,900,000 lines of code, and extensive documentation.

I am also a principal author of the Advanced Solver for Planetary Evolution, Convection, and Tectonics (ASPECT), an open source code for the simulation of long-term motion in the solid earth. With my co-authors, I have received the Helmholtz Software Award 2026, Sustainability Prize for the creation of ASPECT.