Paul R. Woodward

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Paul R. Woodward is an American astrophysicist and applied mathematician.

Life and scientific work

Woodward graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1967 and a PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973 . He then worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (interrupted by three years at the Observatory of the University of Leiden from 1975). From 1985 he was professor of astronomy at the University of Minnesota . In 1995 he founded the Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering there and is its director. He is a Fellow of the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute .

Woodward deals with numerical hydrodynamics and was one of the developers of the Piecewise-Parabolic Method (PPM). From the mid-1980s he also dealt with visualization in scientific computing and used the Cray-2 supercomputer of the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute to visualize fluid flows (calculated with PPM). In order to take the step from two to three dimensions, he started using massively parallel computers from the 1990s on and adapted the PPM code for them. He also dealt with the necessary compiler technology.

In addition to applications in astrophysics, he also dealt with those in meteorology , high-speed gas flows, plasma physics , magnetohydrodynamics , laser fusion and shear flows.

In 1995 he received the Sidney Fernbach Award .

Fonts (selection)

  • with Phillip Colella : Piecewise parabolic method (PPM) for gas-dynamical simulations, J. Comput. Phys., Vol. 54, 1984, pp. 174-201.
  • with P. Colella: The numerical simulation of two-dimensional fluid flow with strong shocks, J. Comput. Phys., Vol. 54, 1984, pp. 115-173.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Laboratory for Computational Science & Engineering. Retrieved December 4, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Michael Schneider: With PSC's Cray XT3, Paul Woodward and David Porter figured out how to do the hardest thing, run small to medium-sized problems really fast . In: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (Ed.): Projects in Scientific Computing . 2007 (English, psc.edu [PDF]).
personal data
SURNAME Woodward, Paul R.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician and astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century