Biosketch

Prof André Weideman

Prof. JAC (André) Weideman from Stellenbosch University is among 28 noteworthy professional mathematicians worldwide who have been elected as a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Other awards include the medal for research distinction from the SA Mathematical Society (2019) and the Chancellor's Award for Research at Stellenbosch (2020).

Prof. Weideman obtained a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of the Orange Free State in 1986 and thereafter lectured at Oregon State University in the USA during the 1990s. In 1999 he returned to South Africa to take up a professorship in applied mathematics at Stellenbosch University. During his career of over thirty years he has published more than 40 research papers in the best journals in applied and numerical analysis, such as SIAM Review, Physica D, Foundations of Computational Mathematics, Journal of Computational Physics, Mathematics of Computation, Numerische Mathematik and Journal of Approximation Theory.

My career started in 1986 with a doctoral thesis under the direction of Ben Herbst at the University of the Free State, as it was then called, where I was also appointed to my first academic position. A postdoctoral year, 1986/7, was spent at MIT where I met Nick Trefethen and started a collaboration that would endure to this day. At MIT, I had a taste of academic life in the USA and shortly after accepted an offer of Assistant Professor from Oregon State University (OSU). I spent the 1990s at OSU and was awarded full tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in 1995. In 1999 I returned to South Africa to accept a professorship at Stellenbosch, with promotion to a distinguished professorship at the beginning of 2021. During this time, I wrote around 50 research papers, the majority of which appeared in top journals in applied mathematics/numerical analysis/scientific computing. Over 2000 total citations are listed in the ISI Web of Science (WoS), recently at a rate of over 150 times per year, with an h-index of 20 (26 in Google Scholar) (*).