Conference for Scientific Computing and Approximation honors Walter Gautschi
04-09-2018
On March 30 and 31, the Department of Computer Science hosted the Purdue Conference for Scientific Computing and Approximation in honor of Professor Walter Gautschi. Presentations spanned the areas of scientific computing, orthogonal polynomials, approximation theory and algorithms, and high-performance computing. Professors Ronald DeVore of Texas A&M, Nick Higham of the University of Manchester, and Gradimir Milovanović of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts delivered keynote talks. There were 10 other talks and 12 research posters presented by participants from 12 academic institutions across the U.S. and Europe.
The event honored Professor Gautschi’s continued work — he has published two books on orthogonal polynomials in the past three years — as well as his 90th birthday. Gautschi is professor emeritus of computer science and mathematics at Purdue University and one of the world's leading scientists in numerical analysis, approximation theory, and special functions.
The conference was organized by Alex Pothen, professor and associate head in the Department of Computer Science and Jie Shen, professor of mathematics and director of the Center for Computational and Applied Mathematics. More than 60 scholars attended, including long-term collaborators, researchers who know Gautschi through his 200+ papers and books, several early-career researchers, and Ph.D. students. Several family members and friends of Walter and Erika Gautschi also joined us for the occasion.
View photos from the conference.
Read Professor Nick Higham’s recap of the conference.