Alumnus Xu Jinchao Elected to Academia Europaea

Written byFeng Chunsheng

Edited byXiang Runyuan

Translated by Li Wenqiang, Huang Can

Recently, the Academia Europaea announcedtheresults of its 2023 membership election. Professor Xu Jinchao, a distinguished scholar in computational mathematics and an alumnus of the Class of 1977 in Computational Mathematics at Xiangtan University, was elected a member.

The Academia Europaea, headquartered in London, UK, was founded in 1988 at the initiative of science ministers from a number of European countries. It was jointly established by national academies representing the highest academic standards across Europe, including the Royal Society, and is an international scientific organization encompassing both Eastern and Western European countries. The Academia Europaea has 20 sections covering humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and science and technology, making it one of the most geographically and academically diverse, highest-status, and most influential academic organizations in the world.

Xu Jinchao is a professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics, The Pennsylvania State University. Hereceivedthe first Feng Kang Prize for Scientific Computing in 1995, Humboldt Senior Scientist Award in 2005, and the National Science Fund of China for Excellent Young Scientists (Class B) in 2006. He was electedasFellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2011, Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019, Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences in 2022, and Fellow of the Academia Europaea in 2023.

His main research interestsincludethe design, analysis, and application of numerical methods, with a particular focus on solving partial differential equations and fast algorithms for big data and their applications. He has made foundational contributions to domain decomposition methods, multigrid methods, and adaptive finite element methods, and is widely recognized as a leading scholar in the international academic community. His representative achievements include the well-known subspace correction algorithm, BPX preconditioner, HX preconditioner, and the XZ identity, among other works associated with his surname, Xu. He has published over 200 academic papers with more than 18,000 Google Scholar citations. Recently, he has investigated models and theories in machine learning and developed MgNet, which integrates multigrid methods with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), offering new perspectives for the mathematical understanding and practical improvement of CNNs. He has also provided new theoretical foundations and solutions for several open problems concerning the approximation properties of neural network functions.