David Gottlieb
Oral History (pdf)
Interviewer: Philip J. Davis
David Gottlieb, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, recalls his career in numerical analysis and scientific computing, emphasizing applications of numerical methods to partial differential equations in aerodynamics. He received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Tel Aviv University, writing a doctoral thesis under Saul Abarbanel on higher order methods for partial differential equations. He then joined MIT as an instructor spending a summer at ICASE at NASA Langley. He enjoyed the interaction with engineers, and subsequently, after joining the Brown faculty, spent summers and sabbatical years at ICASE. Gottlieb discusses the development of spectral methods and other developments in numerical methods for partial differential equations, and speculates on the future of scientific computing in aerodynamics and in biological processes.
Key words: partial differential equations, hyperbolic equations, aerodynamics, spectral methods, Navier-Stokes equations, Euler equations, fast multipole methods, blood flow
Funding Agency: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Time frame: 1960's, 1970's, 1980's
People: Saul Abarbanel, Norman Levinson, Burton Wendroff, Peter Lax, James Ortega, Steve Orszag, Gil Strang, Tony Jameson, Robert W. MacCormack
Location: Tel Aviv University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ICASE, NASA Langley, NASA Ames, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Citation: David Gottlieb Oral history interview by Philip J. Davis, 21 May, 2003, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA
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