Frank Stenger, Ph.D.



Professor Emeritus
School of Computing
University of Utah


Professor Emeritus Stenger joined the Department in 1989. He is primarily a numerical analyst, although his over 200 publications scatter over many other areas of engineering and science, mostly in subjects related to computation. He has lectured at universities in man different countries, and he has held positions for over 3-month periods in 15 institutions. He retired from the School of Computing in 2008.

Some of Frank Stenger's honors include: Appointment of Distinguished Visiting Professor, Univ. of Tsukuba in 1987, receipt of First Degree Prize of the Secretary of Education of Poland in 1996, receipt of the Distiguished Research Award of the University of Utah in 1997, and being ideintified by SIAM as one of a few who contributed most to numerical analysis in the 20th century -- see Historical Remarks.

Asummary of Frank Stenger's past and an account of some of the highlights of his research up to the present is given in Historical Remarks.

In brief, he is the primary developer of a new area of computation, called Sinc Methods. This is a close to optimally efficient, and self contained, family of methods of computation, which enables the computer solutions to hitherto difficult or impossible to solve problems; e.g., they enable solution to PDE and integral equation problems over unbounded regions, and they enable rapid convergence to solutions even in the presence of singularities. Since then, he has also discoverd "indefinite convolution", which combined with both Sinc, polynomial and other methods of approximation. enables even more efficient methods of solving compuational problems. In particlar, this indefinite convolution procedure enables novel and effictive methods of solving problems in control, it yieads novel formulas for Laplace transform inversion and for evaluating Hilbert transforms, it provides a procedure that circumvents the factorization problem of Wiener-hopf methods (an unsolved problem for over 80 years) and it enables solution solution of PDE and integral equation (IE) problems by separation of variables (contradicting the Morse and Feshbach 1953 prediction that this is possible only in certain cases) and in so doing, this indefinite convolution procedure circmvents the requirement of large matrices for solving PDE.

Frank Stenger has authored a 565-page text, Numerical Methods Based on Sinc and Analytic Functions, which was published by Springer-Verlag, in 1993. For further information, click here

He has also co-authored a 349-page text, with M. Kowalski and K. Sikorski , entitled Selected Topics in Approximation and Computation, which was published by Oxford in 1995. These authors were awarded "First Prize" for the best scientific work in Poland in 1995. For further information, click here

More recently, he has authored a 482-page text, Handbook of Sinc Numerical Methods, published by CRC Press, in 2011. This text mainly involves Stenger's Sinc research since 1995. It includes a CD of about 470 Matlab programs. It enables accurate approximation to every operation of calcuus , and it enables the solution to elliptic, parabolic and hyperbolic PDE in all dimensions, over bounded or unbouded curvilinear regions, via use of a finite number of one-dimensional Sinc matrix multiplicationsusing relatively small-sized matirces. For more information, click here

He has completed a 266-page monograph Navier--Stokes Equations on R^3 x [0,T], with D. Tucker and G. Baumann <\m>, which has been published by Springer--Verlag, a textbook with G. Baumann<\em>, Applied Sinc and Polynomial Approximation, which has been accepted for publication by Springer--Verlag, and a textbook, Numerical Analysis, with J.J. McNamee <\em> and W.B. Gearhart <\em>, which is nearly completed.

The 304--page text entitled Sinc Methods for Quadrature and Differential Equations , by J. Lund <\em> and K. Bowers <\em>, which was published by <\em> SIAM <\em> in 1992 is an excellent exposition on the subject of Sinc methods, especially for beginners. For furtherinformation, click here.

Professor Stenger's recreational interests include cooking, cross-country and down-hill skiing, skating, swimming, boating, back-packing and hiking, the enjoyment of nearly all types of music (including playing harmonica, and recorders), bicycles and bicycling, building construction, watching an occasional great movie on television, watching hockey games, doing crossword puzzles, old fashioned dancing, playing bridge, playing golf, and (when he was younger) boxing, playing baseball, playing softball, playing football, playing hockey, and playing soccer.

He once also spoke several languages, although he has become "rusty" for all of these, except perhaps for Elnglish, Swabian and German.

Click here to send an E-mail to Frank Stenger
stenger@cs.utah.edu

Tel (801)359-4452 (leave message if no answer)
Mobile Phone: (801) 558-4831

School of Computing
University of Utah
3414 Merrill Engineering Bldg.
Salt Lake City, UT 84112