Fred Hickernell
Department of Applied Mathematics
Achieving academic excellence through interdisciplinary relationships is an IIT hallmark that Fred Hickernell, chair and professor of applied mathematics, has the opportunity to utilize each day. His research not only combines ideas from several areas of mathematics, statistics, computer science, and various application disciplines, but also offers him an additional bonus. "The advantage of being an applied mathematician is the ability to solve different problems that on the surface may seem unrelated, but actually are similar," he explains. Hickernell searches for ways to avoid the curse of dimensionality in problems of many variables. These ideas lead to time and cost savings in computer simulation for product design and in pricing financial derivatives.
Before coming to IIT, Hickernell spent nearly 20 years in the Far East, where he moved up the ranks to professor of mathematics at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Scientific Affiliation, and he serves as associate editor for four academic journals, including the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis. In 2007, he was honored with the IIT College of Science and Letters Dean's Excellence Award for Research.