Professor Qiang Du and Xiaochuan Tian PhD ’17 Honored by SIAM

Feb 21 2020 | By Jesse Adams

Professor Qiang Du (left) and Xiaochuan Tian PhD ’17 (right).

An influential paper from Professor Qiang Du and his former student Xiaochuan Tian (PhD ’17), has received the SIGEST Award. Only a handful of outstanding papers achieve this distinction, which is bestowed by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics’ premiere journal, the SIAM Review. The award includes the opportunity to republish a revised and updated version for broader readership.

The article, “Asymptotically Compatible Schemes for Robust Discretization of Parametrized Problems with Applications to Nonlocal Models,” provides a general framework for finding numerical solutions for problems parameterized to represent different physical regimes, helping to find numerical schemes that preserve accurate physics as parameters approach asymptotic limits.

Motivated by the mathematical modeling of fracture and originally appearing in the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis (SINUM) in 2014, the paper accrued a high volume of citations and formed part of Tian’s doctoral dissertation in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics (APAM), garnering her an award for best dissertation from the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Tian, whose interests include applied partial differential equations, nonlocal models, and multiscale modeling, will join the University of California, San Diego this fall. She was the first Columbia PhD student supervised by Du, the Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics.

“APAM is a place where people can easily collaborate,” says Tian, now an instructor in mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. “I learned from my years at Columbia Engineering how mathematicians can play a role in helping develop other disciplines, and am looking forward to working on more problems that are inspired by real-world applications.”

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