TRR 181 PI Armin Iske plenary speaker at Godunov Conference in Novosibirsk

Our PI Armin Iske from Universität Hamburg was invited as plenary speaker at the Godunov Conference in Novosibirsk in August 2019.

We asked Armin:

  • Armin, you´ve been invited to talk as a plenary speaker at the Godunov Conference. What was topic of the Conference?

The International Conference on “Mathematics and its Applications”, celebrating the 90th birthday of the right honorable Professor Sergei K. Godunov, was held in Novosibirsk, Russia, during August 4-10, 2019. The conference was organized by the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Novosibirsk State University. The topics of the conference were related to Prof. Godunov’s research areas, ranging from the theory and numerics of partial differential equations, equations of mathematical physics, mathematical modeling, computational methods of linear algebra, and mathematical problems in continuum mechanics. The conference was attended by over 350 participants, including almost 300 from many different regions of Russia and over 50 invited delegates from outside of Russia. Twenty international speakers were invited to give plenary talks. Needless to say that it was both a big pleasure and a great honor for me to give a plenary talk in this prestigious conference.

  • How did S.K. Godunov influence the world of science?

Professor Sergei K. Godunov is well known for his pioneering work on the development and numerical analysis of computational methods and their applications in physics and engineering, especially in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Godunov’s “order barrier theorem” (Godunov, 1959) is of central importance for the analysis of linear schemes for the numerical solution of partial differential equations.

Another milestone in computational fluid dynamics is the “Godunov scheme” (Godunov, 1959), giving a conservative numerical method of first order for solving Riemann problems. The Godunov scheme is regarded as the starting point for the development of higher order methods for hyperbolic problems, i.e., generalized Riemann problems. S.K. Godunov was awarded the most prestigious State Lenin Prize of the former Soviet Union at the age of only 30 years. Much later, the central importance of his ground-breaking work was also recognized in the West, where he received an honorary professor degree from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI, U.S.A.) in 1997. In several laudationes of the conference, Professor Godunov was celebrated as the “brightest" and "most influential” Russian scientists in the area of computational mathematics.

  • What was the topic of your talk on this conference?

The topic of my talk was "On the approximation order of generalized Godunov schemes”, where I gave a general overview over recent advances concerning the construction of high order ADER/WENO schemes for hyperbolic problems. Parts of my talk were based on previous results in joint work with Claus Goetz (Postdoc in M5): Approximate Solutions of Generalized Riemann Problems for Nonlinear Systems of Hyperbolic Conservation Laws, which seems to have raised some interest in the community.