What is Scientific Computing?

Scientific computing is the collection of theories, computational methods, numerical algorithms, and tools required to solve on a computer mathematical models of problems in science and engineering in a fast and efficient manner. Scientific computing is distinct from computer science, which is the study of computers and computations. It is also different from computational science and engineering, which focuses on using computational techniques to elicit insight into scientific or engineering problems, rather than the development of and research into novel techniques of and approaches to approximation and efficient computation that are at the heart of scientific computing.

Current research in the department includes:

• computational problems in mathematical biology and cell biophysics
• numerical methods for partial differential equations in the biological and geophysical sciences
• applied and computational harmonic analysis
• large-scale and combinatorial optimization
• algorithms for large-scale numerical linear algebra problems
• techniques for dimension reduction
• fast numerical methods and their applications in signal and image processing