Thomas Y. Hou

Biosketch

Thomas Y. Hou, PhD is Charles Lee Powell Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and former Chair of Applied and Computational Mathematics at California Institute of Technology. He earned his BS in Mathematics from South China University of Technology, his MS and PhD in Mathematics from UCLA. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Courant Institute in New York University and joined the Courant Institute as a junior faculty in 1989. He joined Caltech as a tenure associate professor in Applied Mathematics in 1993, was promoted to Full Professor in 1998, and was named the Charles Lee Powell Professor in 2004. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Industry and Applied Mathematics, and the American Mathematical Society. Awards include the William Benter Prize in Applied Mathematics, the SIAM Ralph E. Kleinman Prize, the Computational Science Award from the US Association of Computational Mechanics, the Morningside Gold Medal in Applied Mathematics, the SIAM James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, the Francois N. Frenkiel Award from the American Physical Society, and the Feng Kang Prize in Scientific Computing. He was also an invited speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians and an invited plenary speaker of the International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Research Interests

Dr. Hou’s first research interest is on singularity formation in three dimensional incompressible Euler equations. This problem is closely related to the Clay Millennium Problem on the Navier-Stokes equations. Through a careful numerical computation, Dr. Hou and his former postdoc discovered a new class of smooth initial data that could lead to a finite time singularity for the three dimensional Euler equations. This result was very surprising. It took them 8 years to justify their finding rigorously by using a computer assisted proof. Dr. Hou is now working to find a potential singularity of the Navier-Stokes equations and has identified a tornado like singularity. Such discovery may provide a promising path forward to attack the Clay Millennium Problem on the Navier-Stokes equations.

Dr. Hou’s second research interest is to develop the multiscale finite element method with his postdoc and his student to solve complex physical problems with multiple scales. His method has been adopted by several major oil companies in their next generation flow simulators and have been applied to various engineering applications. His method has been used to derive macroscopic equations for a variety of applications, including geomechanics and wave propagation. It also provides a rigorous justification for multicontinuum theories that have been widely used in the engineering community.