Dublin City University has inaugurated a new annual award marking research excellence among its academics. The first President's Research Award was presented yesterday to a DCU mathematician, Dr Eugene O'Riordan, for ground-breaking work in advanced computational mathematics. The award includes a cash prize of £2,000.
The work, by Dr O'Riordan and collaborators in Trinity College, the University of Limerick, the Russian Academy of Sciences and Kent State University in the US, had been "internationally acclaimed", DCU's president, Dr Danny O'Hare, said yesterday. It had inspired 24 related research papers over the past two years.
The award winner had adopted a "deeply innovative approach" which was not reliant on the "brute force" of modern computers, he said.
The award is given to an individual making a "singular contribution" that provides a "quantum jump" in research, said Dr Conor Long, dean of research at DCU.
Dr O'Riordan's study focused on computational equations known as "singularly perturbed heat equations". These can be used across a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines and are applied in mathematical models that can be used to predict how a system will perform.
They come into play when describing systems that are affected by "thin layers", for example how air flows over an aircraft wing.
