University of Texas at Austin
Ivo Babuška

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Ivo Babuška

Core Faculty

Robert B. Trull Chair in Engineering

Professor Emeritus Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics

Research Interests

Uncertainty Quantification Computational Mechanics Partial Differential Equations

Biography

Ivo Babuška, 03/22/1926 to 04/12/2023, was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin.  He earned his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the Technical University of Prague and his D.Sc in mathematics from the Czechoslovakia Academy of Sciences. From 1955-1968 he was Department Head of the Mathematical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. 1968-1995 he was Professor of University of Maryland at College Park where he retired as Distinguished Professor Emeritus. 1995-2018 he was Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Before retirement at UT Austin, he was professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, professor of mathematics, Oden Institute senior research scientist, and a member of the Oden Institute Multiscale Modeling Group. He held the Robert B. Trull Chair in Engineering.  In Spring 2016, Professor Babuška was named the first recipient of the W. A. "Tex'' Moncrief, Jr., Distinguished Faculty Fellowship in Computational Sciences.

Professor Babuška was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, European Academy of Sciences, and Engineering Academy of the Czech Republic. Babuška is noted for his studies of the finite element method (FEM) and proof of the Babuška-Lax-Milgram theorem in partial differential equations.

One celebrated result of FEM is the Babuška-Brezzi (BB) condition, which provides sufficient conditions for a stable mixed formulation. This has guided mathematicians and engineers to develop state-of-the-art formulations for technologically important problems like Darcy flow, Stokes flow, incompressible Navier-Stokes, and nearly incompressible elasticity. He is also known for his work on adaptive methods and the p-, hp-versions of FEM. In addition, he developed the mathematical framework for the partition of unity methods.

He published more than 340 papers in refereed mathematics and engineering journals, more than 80 proceedings papers, and eight books; he was a highly cited author according to www.isihighlycited.com and serves on more than 15 boards of scientific journals and publications.

Among his numerous awards and recognitions are five honorary doctorates, the Birkhoff Prize from the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Congress Medal from the International Association on Computational Mechanics, the John von Neumann Medal from the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, and the Bolzano Medal from the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Professor Babuška created and sponsored both the Babuška Forum and the CSEM Forums speaker series designed to support the needs of Oden Institute CSEM Students. The Babuška Forum was created to expose students to interesting and curious topics relevant to computational engineering and science with technical content at the graduate student level, while the Student Forum was created to provide students with the opportunity to present their own work in a lecture format. Both forums are organized and hosted by current CSEM Students at the Oden Institute. The lvo & Renata Babuska Endowed Excellence Fund has been created to help support the Babuška Forum.