Leslie Greengard is the director of the Simons Center for Data Analysis, at the Simons Foundation, and a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Courant Institute of New York University, where he served as the director from 2006-2011.
He and his collaborators developed the Fast Multipole Method (FMM) for particle simulations and electromagnetic modeling, the fast Gauss transform for the analysis of diffusion and heat flow, and high order accurate methods for a variety of wave propagation problems. Much of Greengard’s work is aimed at the creation of numerical methods for the differential equations of classical physics that are geometrically flexible, high-order accurate, robust, and automatic. He has also worked on a variety of problems in signal and image processing.
He received an M.D. and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Yale University in 1987 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in 2006.
