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Burton Wendroff
Born	(1930-03-10) 10 March 1930 (age 94)
Nationality	American
Alma mater	New York University Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for	Hyperbolic conservation lawss Lax–Wendroff method
Scientific career
Fields	Applied Mathematics
Institutions	Los Alamos National Laboratory University of Denver University of New Mexico
Doctoral advisor	Peter Lax

Burton Wendroff (born 10 March 1930) is an American applied mathematician and an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New Mexico. He is also a retired Fellow and Associate at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is known for his contributions to the development of numerical methods for the solution of hyperbolic partial differential equations. The Lax–Wendroff method for the solution of hyperbolic PDE was named after Peter Lax and him.

Together with co-author Tony Warnock, Burton Wendroff is primary author of the Chess program Lachex, which competed at two World Computer Chess Championships at Cologne (1986) and Madrid (1992).

Career and research

Wendroff received his B.A. degree in mathematics and physics from the New York University in 1951 and M.S. degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1952. After his M.S., Burt joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Staff Member. While at Los Alamos, he went to New York University to do his Ph.D. and received the degree under the supervision of Peter Lax in 1958. The title of his Ph.D. thesis was "Finite Difference Approximations to the Solutions of Partial Differential Equations". During 1966 to 1973, he served as a professor at the University of Denver.

His primary area of research involves the development of numerical schemes for hyperbolic partial differential equations using finite difference method. Together with Peter Lax, he has developed the now classical Lax–Wendroff method. He has developed two-dimensional HLLE Riemann solver and associated Godunov-type difference scheme for gas dynamics problems. Wendroff has also made contribution to the early development of convergence study of finite element method.

Awards and honors

Wendroff was elected as SIAM Fellow of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for his "contributions to the numerical solution of partial differential equations".

Selected publications

Books

• Theoretical Numerical Analysis, Academic Press, 1966.
• The Theory and Practice of Computation, Addison-Wesley, 1966.

Articles

• Lax, Peter (1960). "Systems of Conservation Laws". Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 13. Springer: 217–237. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Lax, Peter D. (1964). "Difference Schemes for Hyperbolic Equations with High Order of Accuracy". Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 17. Springer: 381–398. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Stewart, H.B. (1984). "Two-phase flow: models and methods". J. Comput. Phys. 56 (3). Academic Press: 363–409. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Liska, Richard (1998). "Composite Schemes for Conservation Laws". SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 35 (6). SIAM: 2250–2271. JSTOR 2587257. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Wendroff, Burton (1972). "The Riemann problem for materials with nonconvex equations of state I: Isentropic flow". J. Math. Anal. Appl. 38 (2). Elsevier: 454–466. doi:10.1016/0022-247X(72)90103-5. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Swartz, Blair (1969). "Generalized Finite-Difference Schemes". Math. Comput. 23 (105). American Mathematical Society: 37–49. JSTOR 2005052. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Thomee, Vidar (1974). "Convergence estimates for Galerkin methods for variable coefficient initial value problems". SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis. 11 (5). SIAM: 1059–1068. JSTOR 2156042. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

References

1. "Lachex". univ-lille3.fr. Retrieved 20 March 2010.
2. Wendroff, Burton (May 1993). "Bits and pieces: constructing chess endgame databases on parallel and vector architectures". Applied Numerical Mathematics. 12 (1–3): 285–295. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
3. "An interview with Peter D. Lax" (PDF). SIAM. Retrieved 21 March 2010.
4. "Resume: Burton Wendroff". Retrieved 21 March 2010.
5. LeVeque, Randall J. (2002). Finite volume methods for hyperbolic problems. Cambridge University Press.
6. Gustafson, Karl E. (1999). Introduction to partial differential equations and Hilbert space methods (3 ed.). Dover Publications.
7. Oden, J. Tinsley. "Historical Comments on Finite Elements" (PDF). SIAM. Retrieved 21 March 2010.
8. "SIAM Fellows: Class of 2009". SIAM. Retrieved 2010-03-21.
9. Theoretical Numerical Analysis

External links

• Burton Wendroff at the Mathematics Genealogy Project

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• Living people
• American mathematicians
• 1930 births
• 20th-century mathematicians
• New York University alumni
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
• University of Denver faculty
• Computational fluid dynamicists
• Fellows of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics