Christoph Zenger

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Dr. h.c. mult.

Former professor of applied engineering in information technology and numeric programming
TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology

born August 10, 1940

christoph.zenger(at)online.de

CV

After studying physics, Christoph Zenger did his qualification at 35 as a university academic in mathematics, and has been working up to now between the fields of mathematics and information technology. He conducts research in numeric linear algebra and is involved with hierarchical algorithms for the numerical solutions of partial differential equations. Christoph Zenger wrote ground-breaking works on discretisation of differential equations with a reduced number of unknowns on “sparse grids”. These methods are particularly suited to higher dimensional problems, such as those in quantum mechanics and financial mathematics. Christoph Zenger was a co-initiator and first spokesperson of the Bavarian Consortium for High Performance Scientific Computing (FORTWIHR), which considerably furthered the interdisciplinary collaboration among engineers, scientists, mathematicians and IT specialists using supercomputers to conduct application-orientated research in Bavaria. The advancement of highly gifted students to new challenges in the high-tech sector has been of particular interest to him. For many years he was director of the Ferienakademie, which has been held annually by TUM since 1984 in cooperation with the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the University of Stuttgart. As well as this, he founded, together with the Russian Academy of Sciences and several universities in St Petersburg, the Joint Advanced Student School (JAS) holiday academy.

Kurzbiographie

1959 – 1964	Studies in physics, LMU Munich
1965 – 1976	Research assistant at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center, Munich
1967	Doctorate in mathematics, TUM
1976 – 1980	Academic adviser and professor, TUM
1980 – 1982	Professor of information technology, University of the German Federal Armed Forces, Munich
1982 – 2005	Professor of applied engineering in information technology and numeric programming, TUM

Memberships and honors

Member of the board of management of the Leibniz Supercomputing Center, Munich (since 1985)

Secretary of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities commission on information technology (1995)

Founding spokesperson for the Bavarian Consortium for High Performance Scientific Computing (FORTWIHR) (1992-1995)

Member of the board of management of Bavarian Consortium for High Performance Scientific Computing (FORTWIHR) (1992-2000)

Member of the German Research Foundation (DFG) computer committee (1994-2000) Member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW) (2000)

Deputy chair of the Commission Forum for Technology of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities Spokesperson for DFG Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 438: Mathematical modeling, simulation and verification in material related processes and intelligent systems (2000-2002)

Director of the Holiday Academy Sarntal (south Tyrol) of TUM, Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the University of Stuttgart (1996-2005)

Awards

German Federal Cross of Merit (2001)
Honorary doctorate from Selçuk University, Konya, Turkey (2003)
Honorary doctorate from St Petersburg State University, Russia (2004)
Honorary doctorate from Friedrich Alexander University, Erlangen-Nuremberg (2008)

You can download "Explanations of honors and awards" here [PDF 215 KB]