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COLLOQUIA PATAVINA

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Prof. Alfio Quarteroni (Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne, Switzerland and Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
The challenge of complexity in numerical simulations

March 25, 2014

Abstract
The numerical solution of complex physical problems requires appropriate mathematical models and accurate numerical methods. Often the numerical problem is so large that devising computational reduction techniques, and developing efficient parallel algorithms by exploiting a dimensional reduction paradigm, becomes necessary. This presentation will address some of these issues and a few representative applications such as geodynamics, sports design and medicine, with a special focus on the complex interactions governing blood motion and artery wall deformation, and the interplay between electrical, mechanical and fluid-dynamical processes occurring in the heart.

Short bio
Alfio Quarteroni was born in Ripalta Cremasca (CR), and received his Laurea in Mathematics in 1975 from the Universita' di Pavia. He is Full Professor of Numerical Analysis at the Politecnico di Milano since 1989 and holds the Chair of Modelling and Scientific Computing (CMCS) at EPFL, Lausanne (Switzerland), since 1998. He is: founder and Scientific Director of MOX-Modelling and Scientific Computing - Politecnico di Milano, since 2002; Director of the Center for Advanced Modeling Science (CADMOS) at EPFL, since 2009; President of MOXOFF, Milan, since 2010; Director and founder of the Mathematics Institute of Computational Science and Engineering (MATHICSE) at EPFL, Lausanne (Switzerland), since 2010. During his career, he has supervised about 40 Ph.D. students and more than 100 master students. He has been member of several scientific boards of European institutions. Alfio Quarteroni received various honors and awards: the NASA Group Achievement Award for the pioneering work in Computational Fluid Dynamics (1992), the SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize (2004), the IACM (International Association of Computational Mechanics) Fellow Award (2004). He has been elected: Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences (EAS), since 2010; Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), since 2009; Paul Harris Fellow, 2008; Member of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italian National Academy of Sciences), Roma, since 2004; Fellow of International Association of Computational Mechanics, since 2004. He has been also recipient of the Galileian Chair from the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. He was plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Madrid in 2006. He is recipient of the ERC Advanced Grant "MATHCARD". Alfio Quarteroni is famous also for the variety of his interests in applied mathematics and his spectacular projects, like the collaboration with the team Alinghi for the America's Cup, won in 2003 and 2007, that has been followed by a laurea honoris causa in naval engineering from the University of Trieste (information related to this project can be found here: http://cmcs.epfl.ch/projects/alinghi). He is author of 18 books and of almost 250 papers published in international Scientific Journals and Conference Proceedings, which have become leading in their subject.
His home page is at: http://cmcs.epfl.ch/people/quarteroni