Short CV
Yannis Kevrekidis studied Chemical Engineering at the National Technical University in Athens. He then followed the steps of many alumni of that department to the University of Minnesota, where he studied under Rutherford Aris and Lanny Schmidt (also Dick McGehee and Don Aronson in Mathematics) on computational studies of dynamical systems, which still remains the main theme of his research.
He was a Director's Fellow at Los Alamos in 1985-86.
He has been at Princeton since 1986, where he teaches Chemical Engineering and also Applied and Computational Mathematics.
His research interests have centered around the dynamics of physical and chemical processes, types of instabilities, pattern formation, and their computational study. More recently he has developed an interest in multiscale computations and the modeling of complex systems.
Along with several students and collaborators he has developed the Equation-Free approach to complex systems modeling, explored its capabilities in several areas, and is now working on linking it with moder data mining/machine learning techniques in what could be called an "Equation-Free and Variable Free" approach.
He has been a Packard Fellow, an NSF PYI and the Ulam Scholar at LANL.
He holds the Colburn and Wilhelm Awards of the AIChE, the Crawford prize of SIAM/DS and a Humboldt prize.
He has been the Gutzwiller Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, is currently a senior Hans Fischer Fellow at IAS-TUM in Munich, and next year he will also be an Einstein Visiting Fellow at FU/Zuse Institut Berlin.
Selected Awards
- 2016-2018, Einstein Foundation and Zuse Institute, Distinguished Visiting Fellowship
- 2016, Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, Rothschild Visiting Distinguished Fellowship, 2016
- 2015-2017, Institute for Advanced Study, Technical University of Munich, and EEC: Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship
- 2013, Microsoft Visitor, Newton Institute, Cambridge University
- 2010-2011, Martin Gutzwiller Fellowship (Max Planck Institute for Complex Systems, Dresden)
- 2010, AIChE Richard H. Wilhelm Award
- 2008, Computing in Chemical Engineering Award, Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE)
- 2005, Guggenheim Fellowship
- 2005, Moore Distinguished Visitor, Caltech
- 2003, J.D. Crawford Prize, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
- 1998, Humboldt Research Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- 1997, Bodossaki Academic Award in Applied Science
- 1994, Allan P. Colburn Award, American Institute of Chemical Engineers
- 1989, Presidential Young Investigator, National Science Foundation
- 1988, Packard Fellowship, David and Lucile Packard Foundation
Research Interests
I am both a computational engineer and an applied/computational mathematician: a modeler. I use the computer to do experiments, to motivate experiments, to design experiments; to detect places where new mathematics could be done, to implement recent mathematics; to explore complex systems by making things happen in simulations that do not happen in nature, maybe do not happen in nature yet.
I was trained as a chemical engineer in Greece, came to the US for my PhD in Minnesota at the time that nonlinear dynamics were blossoming; was a postdoc at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at LANL; and have been in Princeton since 1986 (in Engineering, in Applied and Computational Mathematics, and as associate faculty in Mathematics).
Most of my research career up to 2000 was in dynamics, instabilities and pattern formation; mainly, in developing algorithms that went beyond simple simulation, to compute and quantify instabilities and bifurcations. There were also beautiful interactions with experimentalists (like the development of micro-designed and micro-addressable catalysts with G. Ertl at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin).
In the last 15 years, with my students and many international collaborators, we have pioneered a radically new approach to complex systems modeling and computation (the equation-free approach). The novelty and broad scope of this approach has led to extensive research in theory and many applications across disciplines ranging from engineering to physical chemistry, and from evolutionary biology to social modeling and mathematics itself. In more recent years this line of work has blossomed by forging new links (via harmonic analysis) to modern machine learning tools and techniques. The vision emerging from these developments meshes very well conceptually and functionally with our vision and research activities in at the IAS-TUM (in Mathematics and Physics as well as in Engineering).
Building on our shared vision, this Hans Fischer Fellowship will catalyze the integration of our complementary strengths towards the ambitious goal of forging novel approaches to mathematical modeling (linked with data mining) across the sciences and engineering.
Selected Publications
- Nadler, B.; Lafon, S.; Coifman, R.R.; Kevrekidis I.G.: Diffusion maps, spectral clustering and reaction coordinates of dynamical systems. Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis 21, 2006, 113-127.
- Kevrekidis, Ioannis G.; Gear, C. William; Hummer, Gerhard: Equation-free: The computer-aided analysis of complex multiscale systems. AIChE Journal 50 (7), 2004, 1346-1355.
- Hummer, Gerhard; Kevrekidis, Ioannis G.: Coarse molecular dynamics of a peptide fragment: Free energy, kinetics, and long-time dynamics computations. The Journal of Chemical Physics 118 (23), 2003, 10762.
- Gear, C. W.; Kevrekidis, Ioannis G.: Projective Methods for Stiff Differential Equations: Problems with Gaps in Their Eigenvalue Spectrum. SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 24 (4), 2003, 1091-1106.
- Kevrekidis, I.G.; Gear, C.W.; Hyman, J.M.; Kevrekidis, P.G.; Runborg, O.: Equation-free, coarse-grained multiscale computation: Enabling mocroscopic simulators to perform system-level analysis. Communications in Mathematical Sciences 1, 2003, 715-762.
- Gear, C.W.; Kevrekidis, Ioannis G.; Theodoropoulos, Constantinos: ‘Coarse’ integration/bifurcation analysis via microscopic simulators: micro-Galerkin methods. Computers & Chemical Engineering 26 (7-8), 2002, 941-963.
- Theodoropoulos, C.; Qian, Y.H.; Kevrekidis, I.G.: “Coarse” stability and bifurcation analysis using time-steppers: A reaction-diffusion example. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, 2000, 9840-9843.
- Shvartsman, Stanislav Y.; Kevrekidis, Ioannis G.: Nonlinear model reduction for control of distributed systems: A computer-assisted study. AIChE Journal 44 (7), 1998, 1579-1595.
- Deane, A. E.; Kevrekidis, I. G.; Karniadakis, G. E.; Orszag, S. A.: Low-dimensional models for complex geometry flows: Application to grooved channels and circular cylinders. Physics of Fluids A: Fluid Dynamics 3 (10), 1991, 2337.
- Jolly, M.S.; Kevrekidis, I.G.; Titi, E.S.: Approximate inertial manifolds for the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation: Analysis and computations. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 44 (1-2), 1990, 38-60.
- Kevrekidis, Ioannis G.; Nicolaenko, Basil; Scovel, James C.: Back in the Saddle Again: A Computer Assisted Study of the Kuramoto–Sivashinsky Equation. SIAM J. Appl. Math. 50 (3), 1990, 760-790.
- Foias, C.; Jolly, M.S.; Kevrekidis, I.G.; Sell, G.R.; Titi, E.S.: On the computation of inertial manifolds. Physics Letters A 131 (7-8), 1988, 433-436.
Publications as TUM-IAS-Fellow