Layne T. Watson

My work is at the interface of computer science, mathematics, and engineering. The overall goal is to provide sophisticated mathematical software, justified by rigorous mathematical analysis, to attack significant practical engineering and scientific problems.

An example is the HOMPACK project that was designed to make mathematically obscure homotopy methods available to the typical engineer, and to provide production quality software to the user community. HOMPACK is now in use at hundreds of sites from Australia to Yugoslavia, and it has been successfully applied to problems in fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, composite materials, chemical engineering, economics, biology, robotics, computer vision, optimal control, circuit design, machine learning, and nonlinear optimization.

Over the years, I have done mathematical analyses in the areas of approximation theory, homotopy theory, optimization, nonlinear equations, and computer vision.

Recently, my focus has been on the application of parallel computation to large scale, interdisciplinary engineering problems, and to bioinformatics.