Douglas N. Arnold

Douglas Norman Arnold (born 1954 ) is an American mathematician who is engaged in Applied and Numerical Mathematics.

Life and work

Arnold studied at Brown University ( BA 1975) and at the University of Chicago, where in 1976 he took his master's degree and doctorate in 1979 at Jim Douglas (An Interior Penalty Finite Element Method with Discontinuous Elements). From 1979 he was at the University of Maryland in College Park as an assistant professor and from 1989 as a professor. He was professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania ( where he simultaneously professor of computer science in 1991 until 1994) 1989. 1996 to 2001 he was there Associate Director of the Institute for High Performance Computing and Applications and 1997-2001 Co-Director of the Center for Computational Mathematics and Applications. Since 2001 he is professor at the University of Minnesota, from 2008 as a McKnight Presidential Professor of Mathematics. 2001-2008 he was the Director of The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA ). He has been a visiting professor in Oslo (Centre of Mathematics for Applications), Pavia, at the Mittag-Leffler Institute, Heriot- Watt University, the Albert- Ludwigs- University of Freiburg, Darmstadt Technical University and ETH Zurich.

He worked among others with finite elements in differential form calculus with applications in the theory of general relativity (for example, black hole collisions ) and elasticity theory (theory of plates and shells). Its discrete version of the differential form calculus (developed from around 2002 ) is also used to study the stability of finite element solutions in problems with partial differential equations.

2008/ 09 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. Since 2009 he has SIAM Fellow and at the same time for the 2009/2010 president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics ( SIAM ). He is a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences. In 2002 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Beijing (Differential Complexes and Numerical Stability). In 1991 he received the first Giovanni Sacchi Landriani price of the Lombard Academy of Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

He is co -author with Jonathan Rogness an award-winning film about Möbius transformations ( seen on Youtube about 1.5 million times (2009) ).