ICES Ranked No. 1 for Interdisciplinary Applications of Mathematics

The Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) ranked The University of Texas at Austin number one in the world in the discipline “Mathematics: Interdisciplinary Applications,” the academic area addressed by the university’s Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES).

ICES is an interdisciplinary unit that organizes, administers, and manages interdisciplinary research, and teaching of the University's offerings in computational science and applied mathematics. This includes the graduate degree program in Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSEM).

CWUR has published a global ranking of universities since 2012, but this is their first set of subject rankings. The subject rankings list top 10 institutions in each field. They are based on the number of research articles in the world’s most elite journals – using data from Clarivate Analytics, previously part of Thomson Reuters.

The CWUR Rankings by Subject 2017 represent the first national or international effort to include interdisciplinary mathematics applications programs, a relatively new academic area.

The University of Texas and ICES' number one ranking was followed by Stanford University; Northwestern University; Polytechnic University of Catalonia; University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; Dalian University of Technology; University of California, San Diego; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; National University of Singapore; and Technical University of Munich.

Currently ICES oversees more than 164 interdisciplinary research projects involving faculty from 18 academic departments and five schools and colleges within the university.

"This ranking reflects the remarkable history of ICES over the last quarter century that led to UT's ranking as a world leader among interdisciplinary applied math programs," said J. Tinsley Oden, director of ICES. "We have acquired more than $500 million in research and philanthropic funding during that time, which produced research publications other scholars cited more than 500,000 times. To further share our scientific and mathematical insights and gain new perspectives, we have supported more than 1,000 visiting scholars from around the world whom we hosted at ICES."

The Institute supports 46 core faculty and more than 150 affiliated faculty who research and teach in the graduate program known as the Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSEM) Graduate Studies program. The core faculty have generated more than 515,000 citations for their published work, have numerous honorary doctorates, and memberships in more than 20 national academies worldwide.

CWUR developed the largest academic ranking of global universities that measured the quality of education and training of students, as well as the prestige of the faculty members and the quality of their resources, without relying on surveys and university data submissions, as do some other rankings.