Date: Monday, March 1, 2004 Time: 11:30 a.m. Room: Lecture Hall 282, Reitz Union

Abstract: The lecture will recall the origin of the inf-sup condition (with its various names) and its use for proving the stability of mixed formulations. Then the various stabilizing techniques will be briefly discussed, and in particular the use of bubble functions and their relations with the subgrid capturing techniques.

Professor Franco Brezzi has made enduring contributions to the design and theory of numerical methods for partial differential equations. A cardinal property required of good mixed finite elements has long been known as the Babuska-Brezzi condition. He is presently the director of the Istituto di Analisi Numerica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) in Pavia. He is a member of the Istituto Lombardo, Accademia di Scienze e Lettere since 1991, and is a founding member of the International Society for Computational Engineering and Science. He was invited to deliver a lecture at the International Mathematical Congress, Berkeley, in 1986. He has received numerous awards including the Citta di Cagliari for Mathematics in 1992 and the T.H.H. Pian medal in 2000.

This featured lecture is being arranged in connection with the Mathematics Department's Special Year in Applied Mathematics. For more information see the website:
http://qseries.org/special03.