Alfio Quarteroni SIAM Oral History; 2004-06-22

An interview with Alfio Quarteroni Conducted by Philip Davis on 22 June, 2004 Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island Interview conducted by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, as part of grant # DE-FG02-01ER25547 awarded by the US Department of Energy. Transcript and original tapes donated to the Computer History Museum by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics © Computer History Museum Mountain View, California An interview with Alfio Quarteroni Conducted by Philip Davis on 22 June, 2004 Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island Interview conducted by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, as part of grant # DE-FG02-01ER25547 awarded by the US Department of Energy. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 3600 University City Science Center Philadelphia, PA 19104-2688 Copyright 2006, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics ABSTRACT: Professor Alfio Quarteroni discusses a range of topics in this interview with Phil Davis, including his work on finite elements, spectral methods, and domain decomposition. He began studying economic issues in a more professional school before switching over to study mathematics. Quarteroni received his Ph.D. from University of Pavia in Italy, completing a thesis on finite methods under Franco Brezzi. He finished it up in Paris, at the Laboratoire d'Analyse Numérique (now called the Laboratorie Jacques-Louis Lions), where he was encouraged to begin studying spectral methods. Professor Enrico Magenes, who dominated mathematics at Pavia, also exerted a strong influence on Quarteroni. Quarteroni observes how numerical methods have gone from obscure, rarely-used tools to common ones, although they are still not popular in some quarters of the engineering community. Quarteroni notes that low-order methods such as finite elements and higher- order methods such as spectral methods seem to be merging. Numerical methods are necessarily tied to experimental data. One of the challenges, especially in the airplane industry, is multi-objective optimization involving various fields of mathematics and physics. Quarteroni later became interested in domain decomposition, an area that became important with the rise of parallel computing but which are now important in a variety of fields, including the design of racing yachts. Quarteroni has been heavily involved in addressing various fluid dynamics problems central to the design of America's Cup boats, and his work recently helped boost the Swiss team to an unexpected victory. He enjoys teaching both engineering and math students, which he currently does both at the Politecnico di Milano in Italy and at the Polytechnic Institute of Lausanne in Switzerland. The former, Quarteroni notes, is the best technical institute in Italy and the latter is one of the most international educational institutions in all of Europe, attracting students from across Europe and the world. Quarteroni also discusses prominent figures in Italian mathematics, including Mauro Picone, for whom the Picone Institute is named, Gaetano Fichera, and Ennio De Giorgi. Quarteroni 2 PHIL DAVIS: This is an interview conducted with Professor Alfio Quarteroni on June 22, 2004, held in the Applied Mathematics Department of Brown University. The interviewer is Phil Davis. The occasion of this interview as the conference, the International Congress dealing with numerical methods for partial differential equations in which Professor Quarteroni was a participant. One of the things that I found remarkable about this conference, because I have been in the business for maybe sixty years or so, was the fact that when I started there were very few individuals in the whole world that were interested in research in numerical methods. There were very few books on the topic, there were practically no courses given in the various mathematical or even engineering departments, and now it’s quite different. Now we have almost 200 people attending this conference, and this is only on one particular topic of numerical methods. I wonder if you have any reaction to this change? ALFIO QUARTERONI: Ah, that’s interesting. Well, what is perhaps the most surprising is the fact that this is a special conference on high-order methods, which are certainly not the most popular among the engineering community. And they were new thirty years ago or twenty-five years ago, after the pioneering works of some people – among them David Gottlieb and Steven Orszag – when these methods were used only in very special kind of applications, very special kind of environments, typically for achieving very high accuracy coding, very high accuracy for complex fluid dynamics, complex flow sets. Nowadays it seems that these methods have achieved a certain level of maturity in their flexibility and that people from engineering science, from physics, from technology, are more and more interested in it. I think this is a kind of general remark. Perhaps thirty years ago, or twenty, twenty-five years ago, numerical methods were used in applications to really produce qualitative behavior of phenomena. When they were used to get quantitative analysis, then this was on relatively simple partial differential equations. Today, the mission is to be able to get quantitative information also for very complex (mathematically speaking) equations: Navier-Stokes equations for complex fluids, or equations for wave propagation in heterogeneous media, or equations for semiconductor devices. When you address these kind of problems you really look for a variety, a plurality, of numerical methods which have different properties, different features, and that are in principle capable of extracting different kinds of information out of the numerical simulation. DAVIS: When you started to describe this you mentioned that these higher-order methods are not popular in the engineering community. Could you say something about this lack of popularity? QUARTERONI: I think that when I started on this subject....well, perhaps I should first of all make a few opening remarks about myself. I graduated from Pavia, in Italy, and I wrote my thesis in finite elements. This was in the mid 1970s. At that time finite elements were very popular in applications because of their superior capability of following some Quarteroni 3 complex geometries or to cope with complex structure. I think that this has produced over the years a number of very important complex codes, which have then been made available to the industry, and I think that now they are dominating the scene. So I think I’m not wrong if I say that most codes which are available in the industrial market are based on finite elements or finite volumes, and both of these are low-order methods. Spectral methods are the more sophisticated methods which, in principle, are potentially superior, in the sense that they are capable of producing results with much more accuracy. But they have some intrinsic limitations – at least they used to have some intrinsic limitations – for instance, concerning the shape of the domains on which they could have been applied. Today, however, the gap is much thinner and people are trying to merge, essentially, two types of techniques and making them available for complex geometries and also for achieving high accuracy. DAVIS: When I see a triangularization of a airplane surface, can I assume that we’re dealing with finite-element methods there? QUARTERONI: Very often this is the case, in the sense that, in aerodynamics in particular, very often numerical solutions of Euler equations or of compressible Navier- Stokes equations are based on other finite elements or finite volumes. However, recently, (and we’ve seen several examples in this conference) even people working in high-order methods, like spectral methods, are trying to adapt these approach to two- or three-order domains. So I’m pretty confident that in a few years we could see very remarkable applications of high-order methods also in regions, complex regions, partitioned in triangles or tetrahedra. You might even see it in some cases now. DAVIS: One of the...let me go back. Could you just say one or two words, for the sake of the people that are going to listen to this tape, about the distinction between the low-order method and the high-order method. Does it have to do with the power of h, or what? QUARTERONI: Well, again, now the border is less clear cut than it used to be. Let me again go back to perhaps the most traditional perception of this concept among the engineering community. When you talk about low-order methods you talk, for instance, of finite volumes of finite elements, and you know from the beginning that you are building a method which has an intrinsic limit in terms of the order of convergence with respect to the grid-size h. You fix the polynomial degree a priori, and this is a limitation in the sense that the order is at most equal to the polynomial degree. If you hope to achieve better accuracy you have to basically refine your grid. On the other hand, higher- order methods, in principle, are capable of producing accurate results if the solution is smooth enough, but without changing the formulas and without changing the construction. So potentially they have the capability of producing high-order accuracy if the smoothness of the data will permit it. So you don’t have to change the code, you don’t have to make any other changes in the algorithms in order to be repaid by high-order accuracy. This is the basic distinction. DAVIS: So you don’t employ adaptive procedures? Quarteroni 4 QUARTERONI: Of course you can, but this is an extra feature. And this is exactly one of the new directions of investigation: using adaptivity in a high-order method and producing what people call the hp-version of finite elements. In that case you play with the two elements – the geometrical element and the functional element (that is the polynomial order) –.

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