Early career honor goes to assistant professor for algebra project

Langou

Julien Langou, Ph.D., an assistant professor of mathematical and statistical sciences at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) at the University of Colorado Denver, recently received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) National Science Foundation (NSF) award, the second CAREER award for CLAS and the third for the CU Denver.

Langou's $400,000 award is a five-year project titled "Foundations for Understanding and Reaching the Limits of Standard Numerical Linear Algebra."

The prestigious CAREER award is given to faculty in the early stages of their academic careers who have exhibited excellence in research and teaching.

"Dr. Langou has shown extraordinary growth as a faculty member since arriving at CU Denver," said Michael Jacobson, Ph.D., chair of the CU Denver mathematical and statistical sciences department.
"Not only has he become one of the leaders within the Department's Research Group in Computational Mathematics, he tirelessly supervises doctoral students, in addition to having taken on a departmental leadership role as the director of undergraduate studies, over which time the department has revamped the undergraduate degrees offered."

According to the study abstract, faster numerical simulations are critical, having applications in numerous areas, for example, in the basic sciences for enabling novel scientific discoveries, or in engineering, for developing new products and ultimately maintaining the competitiveness of the industry. Numerical simulations are used virtually everywhere in daily life today. For example, numerical simulations enable better models for weather forecasting, resulting in more accurate forecasting, and more accurate models for automobiles or aircraft before construction.

Overall, Langou's research leads to a better understanding of algorithms and their intrinsic limitations, and eventually results in better, near-optimal algorithms.
Components of this research represent tremendous challenges given the complexity of the current computing architecture and the problem to be solved. The results of this research will be communicated in classes, and through the publication of a book, the distribution of source codes and the development of web documents.

Hai Lin, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry, received the first CU Denver College of Liberal Arts and Sciences CAREER award in 2010.