Christoph Zenger (born 10 August 1940) is a German mathematician.

Career

Born in

Lindau Lindau (german: Lindau (Bodensee), ''Lindau am Bodensee''; ; Low Alemannic: ''Lindou'') is a major town and island on the eastern side of Lake Constance (''Bodensee'' in German) in Bavaria, Germany. It is the capital of the county (''Landkreis' ...

, Zenger studied physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and did a doctorate in mathematics (theory of normed vector spaces) in 1967. In 1973 he did his habilitation in mathematics and in 1977 he became professor of mathematics at

Technical University of Munich The Technical University of Munich (TUM or TU Munich; german: Technische Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and applied and natural sciences. Establis ...

. In 1980 he accepted an offer of a full professorship from the

Bundeswehr University of Munich 200px, Entrance to the university Bundeswehr University Munich (german: Universität der Bundeswehr München, UniBw München) is one of two research universities in Germany at federal level that both were founded in 1973 as part of the German Ar ...

. In 1982 he returned to TU Munich to fill a chair in computer science. In 2000 Zenger was selected as a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He retired in 2005, but is still active in research. The most important of Zenger's scientific achievements is the discovery of how to harness approximation on

sparse grid Sparse grids are numerical techniques to represent, integrate or interpolate high dimensional functions. They were originally developed by the Russian mathematician Sergey A. Smolyak, a student of Lazar Lyusternik, and are based on a sparse tensor ...

s for the efficient solution of

elliptic partial differential equations Second-order linear partial differential equations (PDEs) are classified as either elliptic, hyperbolic, or parabolic. Any second-order linear PDE in two variables can be written in the form :Au_ + 2Bu_ + Cu_ + Du_x + Eu_y + Fu +G= 0,\, whe ...

in higher dimensions. Beside his substantial scientific work, Zenger will be remembered for his contributions to contemporary wisdom, the most notable of which have been collected in the volume ''Löwenzähnchen am Bachesrand''.

Selected publications

* ''A cache-oblivious self-adaptive full multigrid method'' (2006) * ''Der Fluch der Dimension in der numerischen Simulation'' (2004) * with Hans-Joachim Bungartz and Michael Griebel: ''Einführung in die Computergraphik''. Vieweg, Braunschweig 2002, * with Sascha Hilgenfeldt and Robert Balder: ''Sparse Grids''. SFB, München 1995. * with Michael Griebel and Michael Schneider: ''A combination technique for the solution of sparse grid problems''. SFB, München 1990

References

External links

''Löwenzähnchen am Bachesrand''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zenger, Christoph 1940 births Living people 20th-century German mathematicians People from Lindau Academic staff of the Technical University of Munich Recipients of the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany 21st-century German mathematicians