Imperial News

DoC/Maths Research Fellow wins the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software 2015

by Royston Ingram

Dr David Ham has won the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software 2015 for his work on the 'Dolfin-adjoint' project.

The Wilkinson Prize was established to honor the outstanding contributions of Dr. James Hardy Wilkinson to the field of numerical software. It is awarded every four years to the entry that best addresses all phases of the preparation of numerical software at the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics by Argonne National Laboratory, the National Physical Laboratory and the Numerical Algorithms Group. The recipients are authors of an outstanding piece of numerical software

Dr David HamDavid Ham a Research Fellow here in the Department of Computing and the Department of Mathematics along with  M.E. Rognes of the Simula Research Laboratory, P.E. Farrell of the University of Oxford and S.W. Funke of the Simula Research Laboratory have won the award for their work on  “dolfin-adjoint,” a package which automatically derives and solves adjoint and tangent linear equations from high-level mathematical specifications of finite element discretizations of partial differential equations.

The prize will be presented at ICIAM 2015 in Beijing and will consist of $3000 plus a commemorative plaque for each winner.

Speaking of the 2015 winning software, Mike Dewar, Chair of the Wilkinson Prize Board of Trustees and Chief Technical Officer at NAG said "dolfin-adjoint is an excellent piece of software that can solve problems in a range of application areas. Through its elegant use of high-level abstractions it makes performing what is usually a very challenging piece of computation seem extremely natural."

Well done David!

Read more at:

Wilkinson Prize: http://www.nag.com/other/WilkinsonPrize.html

Dolfin-adjoint features: http://dolfin-adjoint-doc.readthedocs.org/en/latest/features/index.html