Colloquium

In this talk, I will discuss some old and new problems where fancy numerical methods are mandatory. It is also possible to make some of them extremely fast. I will give an example using kinetic methods for the compressible navier Stokes equations. This is a joint work with Gauthier Wissocq, CEA, France.

Biography

Professor Rémi Abgrall has been a faculty member at the University of Zurich since 2014, and has served as Director of the Department of Mathematics since 2021. He is a renowned applied mathematician, recognized for his significant contributions to computational fluid dynamics, the numerical analysis of conservation laws, multiphase flows, and Hamilton–Jacobi equations. In 2014, Professor Abgrall was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) held in Seoul. In recognition of his groundbreaking work on numerical methods for conservation laws—particularly in the areas of multi-fluid flows and residual distribution schemes—he was elected a SIAM Fellow in 2022. He is a member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2025, he received the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Award (also known as the Humboldt Award), the highest honor conferred by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He was also awarded the 2024 ECCOMAS Prandtl Medal and previously received the GAMNI Prize from the French Academy of Sciences. From 2015 to 2024, Professor Abgrall served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computational Physics and has held editorial positions at several leading international journals, including Mathematics of Computation,  M3AS, CiCP and Science China.