Kai Diethelm is a software developer for GNS Gesellschaft f¿r Numerische Simulation mbH in Braunschweig, Germany, and an adjunct professor at the Computational Mathematics Institute, Technische Universit¿t Braunschweig. His position at GNS is focused on the development of specialized mathematical software for the highly accurate simulation of sheet metal forming processes, with applications mainly stemming from the automotive industry and their suppliers. This includes work on a finite element package, including the parallelization of the code. Moreover, he is involved in aspects dealing with pre- and post-processing, including the visualization of the results, and the integration of the code into a virtual process chain with an emphasis on the optimization of the forming operation in various ways.

Before joining GNS, he held research and teaching positions in applied and numerical mathematics at the universities of Hildesheim, Gie¿en and Braunschweig, where he has mainly worked in numerical integration and the numerical solution of differential equations. His favorite fields in this area are differential equations of noninteger order that can be used, for example, to model the mechanical behavior of viscoelastic materials like rubber, modern plastics (such as polymers), and even biological tissue, under the influence of external forces. He is a member of the editorial boards of Fractional Calculus and Applied Analysis and Fractional Dynamic Systems.

He received his diploma in mathematics from Technische Universit¿t Braunschweig in 1992, a PhD in computer science from Universit¿t Hildesheim in 1994, and a habilitation degree in mathematics, also from Universit¿t Hildesheim, in 1998. In addition, he has been named an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chester, UK.

Read our Q&A with Kai Diethelm here.