E s c o l a F A P E S P

Annalisa Buffa

Professor of mathematics at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Palestra

Computational mathematics and its impact in all sciences

Computational mathematics is the working arm of mathematics. In computational mathematics, rigorous mathematical reasoning is used to design robust and accurate algorithms that typically serve multiple fields of application.

In this talk, I will focus on the branch of computational mathematics that deals with the mathematical modeling and simulation of complex physical phenomena described by partial differential equations. This branch is foundational for digital twins and has a growing impact at the interface of mathematics and other sciences. Inspired by several applications my group and I have tackled recently, I will provide examples of the role of mathematics and mathematicians in developing reliable computational twins, ranging from personalised medicine to additive manufacturing and plasma physics.

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Annalisa Buffa has been a professor of mathematics at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) since 2016 and has been the associate vice president of EPFL for postgraduate education since 2022. Before this, she was the research director and director of the Instituto di Matematica Applicata e Tecnologie Informatiche of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). Annalisa Buffa is a corresponding member of the Academia dei Lincei, associé etranger of the French Academy of Sciences, a member of Academia Europeae and the European Academy of Sciences. She is a leading expert in the numerical analysis of partial differential equations (PDEs).

Her interests span from geometric design, computational mechanics, and computational electromagnetics to approximation theory and functional analysis for PDEs. She received an ERC Starting grant in 2008 and an ERC Advanced grant in 2016. She is a recipient of the Collatz prize from the ICIAM (2015) and was the AWM-SIAM Sonya Kovalevskaya lecturer at ICIAM 2023.

She has been a plenary speaker at several venues, including the ECCOMAS conference in 2022, the centennial of the IMU in 2021, AIMS Conference on Dynamical Systems, Differential Equations and Applications in 2018, the International Congress of Mathematicians (section 15, 2014), the ICIAM in 2015, the GAMM conference and the FoCM conference in 2014. She will be a plenary speaker at the European Congress of Mathematicians in 2024. Annalisa Buffa is a highly cited researcher, according to ISI (2019).