AWARDEE OF MATHEMATICS AND MECHANICS PRIZE

SHI ZHONGCI

Abstract

Shi Zhongci,  was born in December 1933 in City Ningbo, Zhejiang Province. Graduated from Fudan University in 1955, he was sent to the former Soviet Union to study Computational Mathematics in 1956 and returned to China in 1960. In 1965-1986, he was engaged in University of Science and Technology of China and asigned to the chairman of Department of Mathematics and Computer Center. In 1987-1990 he was appointed as the director of Computing Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. In 1991-1994, he held the position of the director of State Key Lab of Scientific and Engineering Computing and since 1995 he has become the chairman of Academic Committee of Institute of Computational Mathematics. In 1993-1999 as the cheif-scientist he led the State Key Project “Large Scale Scientific and Engineering Computing". Since 2000 he is the consult for the State Major Basic Research and Development Project “Studies on Large Scale Scientific and Engineering Computing" Prof. Shi was the vice-president of Chinese Mathematics Society for the period 1988-1995 and currently is the president of Chinese Computational Mathematics Society. He was elected as a member of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991.
Prof. Shi is a well-known international expert in finite element methods and one of the leading figure in the Chinese Computational Mathematics Community. His main scientific contribution is the study on Nonconforming Finite Element Methods: he first discovered the wrong direction convergence of certain nonconforming elements; he analyzed convergence properties of many important in practice nonconforming elements; he proved that the “patch test" commonly adopted by engineers to check the convergence of nonconforming elements is not necessary, and proposed a new convergence creterion. These results were awarded the first prize of CAS in Natural Science in 1986 and the third prize of the State Commission of Science and Technology in Natural Science in 1987.
In 1970's Prof. Shi established a theory of Spline Finite Elements which was awarded the second prize of CAS for outstanding achievements in Science and Technology in 1980. Recently he has made new contributions to the nonconforming finite elements and multigrid methods: he appled the  rotated Q1 nonconforming element to the Reissner-Mindlin plate model and obtained the lowest order locking free quadrilateral element; he also established a general framework for the Cascadic multigrid method which does not require coarse grid corrections in solving elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations. The new method is promising in applications.
Prof. Shi is the chief-editor and a member of the editorial board of sixinternational journals on Computational Mathematics. He has been invited to visit and to speak at international conferences more than twenty countries all over the world.