Biographical Sketch - L. Ridgway Scott



L. RIDGWAY SCOTT is professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. He was Professor of Computer Science and of Mathematics at the University of Chicago from 1998 to 2017, and the Louis Block Professor since 2001. He obtained the B. S. degree (Magna Cum Laude) from Tulane University in 1969 and the Ph. D. degree in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973.

His thesis and later research was devoted to fundamental properties of the finite element method, the most widely used computational technique for engineering design and analysis. He was an L. E. Dickson Instructor in Mathematics at the University of Chicago from 1973-1975. From 1975-1978 he held positions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

In 1978, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1980, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Mathematics, with tenure, and in 1984 he was promoted to the rank of Professor. At Michigan, Professor Scott was a founding member of the Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory, an early center for the study of parallel computing and a ``beta-site" for one of the first-generation of hypercube computers, the nCUBE-1.

In 1986, he became Professor of Computer Science and of Mathematics at the Pennsylvania State University where he helped to establish a program in parallel scientific computing which became a ``beta-site" for the second-generation Intel hypercube, the iPSC-2. He also co-founded what later became the W.G. Pritchard Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at Penn State.

At the University of Houston, Professor Scott continued his research on the finite element method as well as parallel computing. In addition, he initiated collaborations with researchers in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Houston and at Baylor College of Medicine to develop enhanced computational techniques in structural biology. From 1992 to 1998, he was the Director of the Texas Center for Advanced Molecular Computation, a National Science Foundation Grand Challenge Application Group.

At the University of Chicago, Professor Scott is continuing his research in all of these areas. He was a Member of the Executive Committee of the ASCI Flash Center and is a founding member of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at the University of Chicago. He was a founding co-Director of the Argonne/Chicago Computation Institute which was established in spring, 1999. He was also the director of the University of Chicago partnership in the The National Partership for Advanced Ccomputational Infrastructure (NPACI) based at SCSC/UCSD.

Professor Scott has published over one hundred eighty papers, and five books, extending over biophysics, parallel computing and fundamental computational aspects of structural mechanics, fluid dynamics, nuclear engineering, and computational chemistry. This includes boundary element, finite difference, finite element and spectral techniques for solving partial differential equations.

Professor Scott has been a member of the editorial board of the Mathematical Modeling and Numerical Analysis (formerly R. A. I. R. O. Numerical Analysis), since 1981. He was a member of the editorial board of the SIAM Journal for Numerical Analysis (1979-1997), Mathematics of Computation (1984-1999), the Houston Journal of Mathematics (1990-1999), SIAM Review (1995-1999) and the Notices of the American Mathematical Society from 1991-1994.

Professor Scott has held visiting fellowships at the University of Bonn, West Germany; ICASE, NASA Langley Research Center; the Mathematics Research Center, University of Wisconsin; Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris; the Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory; and the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, University of Minnesota.

Genealogy Links

In Banff at BIRS May 2004.

Fort Worth saxophonists

L Ridgway Scott
16 May 2011

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