Rotator-MJH Michael Holst is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Physics at UC San Diego. He is a core faculty member in both the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCoM) and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS). He works broadly in numerical analysis, applied analysis, partial differential equations, and mathematical physics, with a particular focus on mathematical and numerical general relativity. He grew up in Colorado, earned a B.S. from Colorado State University in 1987, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1993. He was a von Karman Instructor and Prize Research Fellow in Applied Mathematics at Caltech from 1993-1997, and was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at UC Irvine from 1997-1998, before moving to the Mathematics Department at UC San Diego in 1998. He was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 2000, to Professor of Mathematics in 2003, and appointed as Professor of Physics in 2009. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and a Hellman Fellowship, and is coauthor of a graduate textbook on applied analysis and partial differential equations with Ivar Stakgold. He was selected as a SIAM Fellow in 2016, and currently holds a Chancellor's Associates Endowed Chair at UCSD.

Prof. Holst directs the Mathematical and Computational Physics Research Group (MCP) within the Mathematics and Physics Departments at UCSD, and is the lead developer and architect of the Finite Element ToolKit (FETK). He currently serves as one of the three founding Co-Directors of the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCoM) within the Mathematics Department. He was a founding Co-Director for the interdisciplinary M.S. and Ph.D. Programs in Computational Science, Mathematics, and Engineering (CSME), and served as the lead director from the founding of the Program in 2007 through 2020. He is involved in a number of interdisciplinary research institutes and research training programs on campus, including the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCoM), and the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS). His research is supported by NSF, NIH, DOE, AFOSR, and DTRA, as well as by industrial sponsors and private foundations. As of 2022, he has been the primary supervisor for 18 completed doctoral students, 29 postdoctoral students, and 23 undergraduate honors thesis and/or REU summer research students, of which 5 went on to complete doctorates in pure or applied mathematics at Cambridge, Caltech, Purdue, CMU, and UT Austin. He has also been a mentor for 2 high school students who qualified for ISEF.

The navigation bar to the left has links to more detailed information about Prof. Holst's research and education activities.

Group Blog:
  • The NSF-funded mathematics institute ICERM is hosting a special program on Advances in Computational Relativity over the entire Fall 2020 term (September 9-December 11, 2020). I had planned to be in residence at ICERM all Fall as part of a year-long sabbatical, but the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a number of scheduling changes. This workshop is now being done mostly remotely over Zoom. I will still be taking part, but from San Diego; if you are interested in the subject and/or the lectures, a link to the program is [ here ].

  • A youtube video of our recent research work was released in January 2020, and can be found [ here ]. The video illustrates the meshing technology described in our newly published article: An Open Source Mesh Generation Platform for Biophysical Modeling Using Realistic Cellular Geometries. Credit for the video and much of the technology behind it goes to UCSD Postdoctoral Researcher Chris Lee, and to my other collaborators in the Rangamani Research Lab in MAE at UCSD.

  • Together with Doug Arnold, David Garfinkle, Luis Lehner, and Reinout Quispel, I co-organized a workshop at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University in England that will run from September 30, 2019 through October 4, 2019. The workshop on Structure Preservation and General Relativity is part of the larger Program on Geometry, Compatibility and Structure Preservation in Computational Differential Equations that is running at the Newton Institute in Fall 2019.

    I gave one of the opening lectures at the workshop on Some Research Problems in Mathematical and Numerical General Relativity. The slides from the lecture can be found [ here ], and an abstract and the video of the lecture can be found [ here ]. The video may also be accessed in various formats here [ m4v  | mp4  | webm  | mp3 ]

  • In January 2018, we will be running a UCSD workshop and jointly organizing a related multi-part minisymposium at the JMM Conference at the San Diego Convention Center; see the GPDE2018 website for more information about the workshop and the JMM minisymposium.

  • The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three of the key scientists involved in the development of LIGO and its eventual successful first detections of gravitational waves. The official announcement can be found [ here ].

  • Our group was approached by the AMS for a survey article on mathematical and numerical general relativity, to help explain to the broader mathematical sciences community the mathematics, science, and technology behind the recent gravitational wave detections (there have now been several detections). The article will appear in the October 2016 issue of the Bulletin of the American Mathematican Society, and when available it will be published online [ here ].

  • At 10:30am EST on 11 February 2016, the National Science Foundation, together with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, announced that the first direct detection of a gravitational wave was made on 14 September 2015 by the twin LIGO devices located in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington. The LIGO project, which at over 600 million dollars is the single most ambitious and expensive scientific project ever supported by NSF, represents an incredible scientific and engineering achievement. This successful detection will substantially change astronomy and other areas of physics forever, and the discovery is viewed as comparable in importance to the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson using the Large Hadron Collider. Our group put together some additional information about the LIGO Project for my graduate students, which can be found [ here ]. Links to the announcement and joint press conference by NSF and by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and a link to the Phys. Rev. Lett. article on the discovery that was published online simultaneously with the announcement, can be found below:
  • The year 2015 is the one-hundred year anniversary of the theory of general relativity; in celebration, there are a number of local, regional, national, and international workshops and conferences being held this year. One such conference is the Focus Program on 100 Years of General Relativity being held at the Fields Insitute in Toronto during May and June 2015. As part of this conference, I co-organized one of the Focus Weeks on Constraint Equations and Mass-Momentum Inequalities, and he gave two of the overview talks. The slides from the talks can be found [ here ].

  • The 31st Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting is being held at the University of Oregon on March 13-14, 2015. It is being co-organized by CCoM at UCSD and local organizers in Oregon. For more information see the PCGM31 Conference Website.

  • In July 2014, NSF announced that a collaborative team of mathematicians at the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCoM) at UCSD had received a 5-year $1.8M NSF Research Training Group (RTG) Award. This NSF RTG Award will fund up to five UCSD Mathematics doctoral students participating in the CSME Doctoral Program, as well as provide funding for up to two named CCoM Postoctoral Fellowships each year of the award. CCoM mathematicians Randy Bank, Philip Gill, Michael Holst, Melvin Leok, and David Meyer are the principle invesigators of the NSF Award. For more information about the project, see the RTG Project Website.

  • Our research group and CCoM at UCSD will be hosting the 30th Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting on March 28-29, 2014. For more information see the PCGM30 Conference Website.

  • In April 2013, NSF announced that a collaborative team of mathematicians and mathematical physicists at Stanford University, UCSD, the University of Oregon, and the University of Alaska had received a $798K NSF Focussed Research Group (FRG) Award. The FRG funding award will allow the team to tackle several long-standing open problems in mathematical general relativity. UCSD Mathematician Michael Holst (PI) leads the UCSD portion of the project. For more information about the project, see the FRG Project Website, or the announcement on the NSF Website.

  • In January 2013, we will be running a UCSD workshop and jointly organizing a related multi-part minisymposium at the JMM Conference at the San Diego Convention Center; see the GPDE2013 website for more information about the workshop and the JMM minisymposium.

  • During the 2011-2012 academic year we will run a Reading Course/Seminar Series in the overlapping areas of mathematical and numerical general relativity. There will be about 6-8 talks spread throughout the Fall quarter, with a few additional seminars in the Spring quarter. For the schedule of talks, see the MNGR Seminar Series webpage. We are also running a related UCSD workshop and multi-part minisymposium at the SIAM PDE Conference in November; see the GPDE2011 website. In May 2012, we will hold the Southern California Analysis and Partial Differential Equations Conference (SCAPDE) at UCSD, with a focus on mathematical and numerical general relativity; see the SCAPDE website.

  • In July 2011, NSF announced that a collaborative team of mathematicians at UCSD, Caltech, and Colorado State University had received a $1.1M NSF Focussed Research Group (FRG) Award. The FRG funding award will allow the team to tackle several open problems in numerical general relativity, the solutions of which could have impact on gravitational wave simulation efforts (such as LIGO, VIRGO, and other gravity wave detection devices). UCSD is the lead institution in the FRG project, and UCSD Mathematicians Michael Holst (PI) and Melvin Leok (Co-PI) lead the UCSD portion of the project. For more information about the project, see the announcement on the NSF Website.

  • In June 2010 the source code tree for the entire FETK Project was released under the GNU LGPL (GNU Library General Public License). For more information about FETK, see the FETK Website.

  • In Spring 2008, the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCoM) was founded as a UC-designated Research Center at UC San Diego. The Center was formed by a group of UCSD faculty with common interests in the areas of computational and applied mathematics, and is supported by the UCSD Division of Physical Sciences and by funding awards of the individual CCoM Faculty. CCoM faculty, together with other UCSD faculty and faculty at other institutions, have organized and co-organized a sequence of regional, national, and international workshops and conferences over the last several years, including:
    • FRG-GR-11: FRG: Analysis of the Einstein Constraint Equations, Workshop 11 (July 2019)
    • GPDE2018/FRG-GR-10: GR and Finite Element Exterior Calculus (January 2018)
    • PCGM31: 31st Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting (March 2015, held at Oregon)
    • FRG-GR-5: FRG: Analysis of the Einstein Constraint Equations, Workshop 5 (January 2015)
    • PCGM30: 30th Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting (March 2014)
    • FRG-GR-2: FRG: Analysis of the Einstein Constraint Equations, Workshop 2 (March 2014)
    • GPDE2013: Geometric Numerical Methods for PDE (January 2013)
    • SCAPDE: Southern California Analysis and PDE Conference (May 2012)
    • GPDE2011: Geometric Numerical Methods for PDE (November 2011)
    • RPCCT2011: Rough Paths and Combinatorics in Control Theory (July 2011)
    • DD20: 20th International Conference on Domain Decomposition Methods (February 2011)
    • SI2010: 6th Annual Structured Integrators Workshop (April 2010)
    • PCGM26: 26th Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting (March 2010)
    • REB60: Workshop on Adaptive and Multilevel Methods for PDE (November 2009)
  • In Fall 2007 (PhD) and Fall 2010 (MS), the CSME Graduate Program was officially launched by UCSD. Complete information about the new CSME Graduate Programs, which are the first degree-granting Computational Science Graduate Programs in the UC System, can be found on the CSME Website. Since 2007, we have run a campus-wide CSME Seminar Series covering a broad range of topics in applied mathematics, physical sciences, and computational science. The CSME series, with typically 2-3 lectures each quarter, complements the weekly CCoM Seminars as well as other seminars that run each quarter. The CSME Seminar Speakers include both UCSD faculty as well as visiting faculty from other institutions. The seminar titles and abstracts for CSME and CCoM Seminars are posted on the CCoM/CSME Seminar website and are also announced on the CSME-L mailing list. For information about getting onto the CSME-L and related email lists, see the MCP group webpage.