Rolf Jeltsch

Rolf Jeltsch was born on 31st October 1945 in Zurich. He studied mathematics at ETH Zurich and received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1972. He was Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, from 1972 to 1973; assistant professor at UCLA, California, from 1973 to 1975; and assistant professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky, from 1975 to 1976. In 1976 he became docent at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, and associate professor in 1977. During this period he received a grant from the Swiss National Foundation to visit Stanford for six month and for a three month stay at the Helsinki University of Technology. From 1979 to 1989 Dr. Jeltsch was full professor and director of the Institute for Geometry and Practical Mathematics at the RWTH, Aachen, Germany. Since 1989 he has been full professor at ETH in Switzerland; and, from 1997 to 2008, he has been the study director for the curriculum in computational science and engineering.

Following the retirement of Dr. Jeltsch in 2011 he hold several positions in foreign countries. He spent six month at the University of Lisbon and hold the position of a visiting professor of the H.C.Andersen Academy of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. In addition he was a University Fellow at the Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong and a fellow of the Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo in Brazil.

Dr. Jeltsch is a fellow of the National Mathematical Centre, Abuja, Nigeria, and a foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. He received an honorary degree from the North University of Baia Mare, Romania, in 2000 and of the Helsinki University of Technology in 2008. In 2010 he became Doctor honoris causa of the Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology.

From 1997 to 1999 he was president of the Leonhard Euler Center which is the Swiss Pilot Center of the organization European Community on Flow Turbulence and Combustion (ERCOFTAC). He was president of the European Mathematical Society 1999 to 2002 and the Swiss Mathematical Society 2002 to 2003. He was is President of the Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik, GAMM, 2005 to 2007. He chaired the Scientific Council of the Banach Center from 2002 to 2005 and is advisor to several research institutes in Europe. He was President of the organization ICIAM, International Council on Industrial and Applied Mathematics, from October 2007 to the end of September 2011. He was the Congress Director of the congress ICIAM 2007 held in Zurich 2007.

Dr. Jeltsch's major research interests are in numerical analysis. In the 1970s, his work centered on ordinary differential equations. Since the 1980s, Dr. Jeltsch has focused on hyperbolic partial differential equations, especially systems of conservation laws with applications. In addition, he conducts large-scale computing in scientific and engineering applications.