Heath named a 2010 SIAM Fellow

Michael Heath, the Fulton Watson Copp Chair in Computer Science, has been named a 2010 Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for “contributions in computational science and engineering, especially parallel computing.”

“Mike Heath has been a pioneering researcher and influential educator in the field of scientific computing and numerical analysis, and has been a particular driving force through the Computational Science & Engineering CSE) program at Illinois,” said Rob A. Rutenbar, head of the Department of Computer Science. “We are pleased and proud that he has received this prestigious recognition of his work.”

As director of the CSE program and the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets, Heath's research interests are primarily in scientific computing and parallel computing, and the relationship between them. In scientific computing and numerical analysis, he focuses on numerical linear algebra and optimization, particularly sparse matrix computations, such as direct methods for solving sparse systems of linear equations and least squares problems. Applications of his work in this area have included large-scale problems in geodesy, finite element structural analysis, and simulation of rocket engines.

Heath is also interested in algorithms, languages, architectures, and software systems for parallel computing. Much of his work in this area has involved performance analysis and visualization of parallel programs. He developed a package called ParaGraph to visualize the behavior and performance of message-passing programs on distributed memory parallel computers.

Heath has served as editor of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, Siam Review, and the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, as well as several conference proceedings. He is also author of the widely adopted textbook, Scientific Computing: An Introductory Survey (2nd edition, McGraw-Hil, 2002).

In 2000, he was named an ACM Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2002, he was elected a member of the European Academy of Sciences, and in 2007 he won the Apple Award for Innovation in Science.
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