Edward Granville Sewell is an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

, university professor, and

intelligent design Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins". Numbers 2006, p. 373; " Dcaptured headlines for its bold attempt to ...

advocate. He is a professor of mathematics at the

University of Texas, El Paso The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is a public research university in El Paso, Texas. It is a member of the University of Texas System. UTEP is the second-largest university in the United States to have a majority Mexican American stude ...

Education

Sewell received his PhD from

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money ...

in 1972 and an M.S. in

mechanical engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, and ...

1977 from the

University of Texas, Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

. His BS was from Harding College (now

Harding University Harding University is a private university with its main campus in Searcy, Arkansas. It is the largest private university in Arkansas. Established in 1924, the institution offers undergraduate, graduate, and pre-professional programs. The uni ...

)

Contributions

Mathematics

Sewell's primary work is on the solution of differential equations. He publishe
"The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, Third Edition,"
World Scientific Publishing, 2014 . His major development effort has been the equation solver
PDE2D--A general-purpose PDE solver
Sewell similarly published
"Computational Methods of Linear Algebra, Third Edition,"
an
"Solving Partial Differential Equation Applications with PDE2D"

Views on origins

Sewell is signatory to the

Discovery Institute The Discovery Institute (DI) is a politically conservative non-profit think tank based in Seattle, Washington, that advocates the pseudoscientific concept Article available froUniversiteit Gent/ref> of intelligent design (ID). It was founded ...

's " A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism" petition. In 2000 Sewell compared the lifelong development of his state of the art software program with Darwin's predictions. After positing modeling the early universe and predicting its evolution, Sewell concludes:

Clearly something extremely improbable has happened here on our planet, with the origin and development of life, and especially with the development of human consciousness and creativity.

This is cited by the Discovery Institute as one of the "Peer-Reviewed & Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design", a claim rejected by critics and the judge in the Dover trial. Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District 4: whether ID is science He also wrote an article in ''

The American Spectator ''The American Spectator'' is a conservative American magazine covering news and politics, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and published by the non-profit American Spectator Foundation. It was founded in 1967 by Tyrrell, who remains its editor-i ...

''. In these articles he reiterates the view that evolution violates the

second law of thermodynamics The second law of thermodynamics is a physical law based on universal experience concerning heat and Energy transformation, energy interconversions. One simple statement of the law is that heat always moves from hotter objects to colder objects ( ...

. Mathematician

Jason Rosenhouse Jason Rosenhouse is an American author and professor of mathematics at James Madison University, where he was originally appointed an assistant professor in 2003. He became a full professor in 2014. His research focuses on algebraic graph theory, a ...

wrote a response in ''

The Mathematical Intelligencer ''The Mathematical Intelligencer'' is a mathematical journal published by Springer Verlag that aims at a conversational and scholarly tone, rather than the technical and specialist tone more common among academic journals. Volumes are released quar ...

'' entitled "How Anti-evolutionists Abuse Mathematics" and "Does Evolution Have a Thermodynamics Problem?". Physicist

Mark Perakh Mark Perakh (russian: Марк Пэрах; ''perach'' (פֶּ֫רַח) is the Hebrew word for "flower"; born ''Mark Yakovlevich Popereka'' in 1924, Kiev, Ukraine, died 7 May 2013 in Escondido, California), was a professor emeritus of Mathematics ...

called Sewell's thermodynamics work "depressingly fallacious". In 2010, Sewell published a collection of essays on origins: ''In The Beginning And Other Essays on Intelligent Design'' The Discovery Institute lists as one of the "Peer-Reviewed & Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design" is a postscript to his 1985 book ''Analysis of a Finite Element Method: PDE/PROTRAN''.

References

External links

Granville Sewell
Mathematics Dept. University of Texas El Paso
PDE2D--A general-purpose PDE solver

"Computational Methods of Linear Algebra, 3rd Edition,"
Granville Sewell, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2014

John Pieper,

talkorigins Archive The TalkOrigins Archive is a website that presents mainstream science perspectives on the antievolution claims of young-earth, old-earth, and "intelligent design" creationists. With sections on evolution, creationism, geology, astronomy and homi ...

, Copyright © 2000, updated May 24, 2002 {{DEFAULTSORT:Sewell, Granville 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Intelligent design advocates Living people Purdue University College of Engineering alumni Cockrell School of Engineering alumni Harding University alumni University of Texas at El Paso faculty Year of birth missing (living people)