[firedrake] 30 June: Public lecture by FEniCS project founder Anders Logg

[David Ham]

Tuesday 30 June at 1610 in Huxley 311. No registration required.

Dear all,

FEniCS is a system for automatically creating numerical simulations. As a
part of the FEniCS '15 workshop at Imperial, FEniCS project founder Prof.
Anders Logg of Chalmers University of Technology will be presenting a
public lecture. This is an opportunity to hear about some of the latest
advances in automated simulation technology from one of the leaders in the
field.

Prof. Logg's abstract is below, I look forward to seeing you there.

Regards,

David

*Implementing mathematics: domain specific languages and automated
computing*

Computer simulation is today an indispensable tool for scientists and
engineers in modeling, understanding and predicting nature. Having emerged
as a complement to theory and experimentation, it is becoming increasingly
more important as a result of advancements in hardware, software and
algorithms.

However, in spite of its success and ever increasing importance, simulation
software is still largely written by hand, following a primitive, outdated
and unsustainable pipeline: first express a model in the language of
mathematics, then translate this model - using pen and paper - to a complex
system of data structures and algorithms, then express those data
structures and algorithms in a programming language. Even if those
algorithms can today be expressed in high level programming languages, the
pipeline still involves the translation (obfuscation) of the mathematical
model to computer code.

In this talk, I will argue that we should not strive to translate
mathematical models or methods to computer code. Instead, we should strive
to develop exact computer representations of mathematics that make the
original mathematical model or method native to the mathematical /
programming language.

I will highlight three examples of ongoing work in this direction. First,
the FEniCS Project, an ongoing effort to develop a domain specific language
for expression and solution of partial differential equations; second, an
application of the domain specific language of FEniCS for expressing the
Einstein-Vlasov equations and computing the mass distribution of galaxies;
third, a new effort to implement the abstractions of exterior calculus in a
functional programming language (Haskell) to express and thereby compute
all elements of the periodic table of finite elements.

Acknowledgments: This talk is based on joint work with many people, in
particular the developers of the FEniCS Project (http://fenicsproject.org);
Håkan Andreasson and Ellery Ames (Einstein-Vlasov); Mary Sheeran, Patrik
Jansson, Irene Lobo Valbuena, Simon Pfreundschuh and Andreas Rosén
(functional finite element exterior calculus); and Douglas Arnold (periodic
table of the finite elements).
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