Ivo Babuška

Ivo M. Babuška ( born March 22, 1926 in Prague) is a Czech mathematician, best known for his contributions to the finite element method and the proof of the Babuška -Lax - Milgram theorem, a generalization of the lemma of Lax- Milgram.

Life

Babuška gained his title for the Dipl.- Ing. in Civil Engineering in 1949 at the Czech Technical University in Prague. Two years later, in 1951, he obtained the title of Dr. Tech. as a student of Eduard Čech and Vladimir Knichal the mathematical institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Later he headed the department for partial differential equations, where in 1955 he received his doctorate in mathematics.

Babuška 1968 was appointed professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he taught until his retirement in 1996 and conducted research. He then accepted a position at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is still active today.

In 1994 he received the Birkhoff Prize of the American Mathematical Society and SIAM for ( as the eulogy ) his development of a general theory of error estimation of finite element methods and the - and - finite element method.

Work

An important result of Babuška is the so-called Babuška - Brezzi Ladyschenskaja - condition ( LBB), often also called inf -sup condition, which he 1970/71 regardless of Ladyschenskaja and Brezzi formulated and proved. LBB- condition is a sufficient condition for stability of a mixed finite element problem with saddle point structure. This condition plays a fundamental role in the formulation of stable numerical discretizations of the incompressible Navier -Stokes equations over the stationary Stokes equation up to Darcy's law for flow in sedimentary rock.

In addition, Babuška is known for his work on adaptive finite element algorithms by refining the element size and the order of the elements as well as the combined method.

In mathematics, he delivered, among other contributions to the partition of unity, which are fundamental for smoothness statements and proofs of existence of partial differential equations in the variational formulation.

Babuška published more than 300 articles in scientific journals, delivered more than 70 contributions to conferences and wrote several books. In addition, his work has received several awards.