Obituary: Roland Glowinski

By William Fitzgibbon and Olivier Pironneau 

Roland Glowinski, the University of Houston’s Cullen Professor of Mathematics and an internationally renowned computational and applied mathematician, passed away suddenly on January 26, 2022. He was 84 years old. 

Roland was a member of the French Académie des Sciences, the French Académie des Technologies, the Academia Europa, and the French Order of National Merit. He was also a knight of the Légion d’Honneur, an officer of the French Order of Academic Palms, and a member of the inaugural class of Fellows of both SIAM and the American Mathematical Society. During the course of his career, Roland was honored with numerous prestigious awards, including the Silver Medal of the City of Paris, the Seymour Cray Prize, the Grand Prix Marcel Dassault, and the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics’ Computational Fluid Dynamics Award. He received SIAM’s Theodore Von Kármán Prize in 2004 and the W.T. and Idalia Reid Prize in 2020.

Roland was born in Paris on March 9, 1937, to Eastern European immigrants. During World War II, he and his brother Albert were among the legions of children of Jewish descent who were protected by French individuals. They lived with the Botineau family in Sargé-sur-Braye until the Allied forces liberated France in 1944. This period profoundly influenced Roland and is partly responsible for the sense of humanity and decency that he brought to the mathematics profession. Upon returning to Paris, Roland enrolled in elementary school and demonstrated an early talent in a variety of areas. He passed the entrance examination to the Lycée Charlemagne in 1948 and was admitted to the École Polytechnique in 1958, where he specialized in telecommunications. Following his graduation from École Polytechnique, Roland served honorably as a French officer in the Algerian War. 

After completing his military service, Roland held a position with the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française from 1963 to 1968. However, he soon missed mathematics and enrolled in a correspondence course that led to a master’s degree in pure and applied math. Roland then registered for a doctoral program—the Diplôme d'Études Approfondies (DEA) d'Analyse Numérique—under the supervision of Jacques-Louis Lions and René de Possel. On the basis of his DEA work, Lions arranged for him to join the Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (now INRIA) as a research engineer. In 1970, Roland defended his thèse d'État—about the solution of nonlinear integral equations for filtering color television transmission—at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie. He was then appointed to a professorship at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie and became a scientific director at INRIA.

While at INRIA, Roland created a mixed formulation that was usable with finite elements of low degrees — the fastest methods for viscous flow calculation at the time. Dassault Aviation implemented these methods for a stream function vorticity formulation of airflows. In this same scientific cooperation between INRIA and Dassault, Roland helped debut a simulation of the compressible potential flow equation for an entire aircraft via the finite element method.

In 1985, Roland accepted a chaired professorship at the University of Houston. He maintained his detached status at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie until 2000 and was a visiting professor, adjunct professor, or advisor at numerous institutions around the world. From 1992 to 1994, Roland served as director of the Centre Européen de Recherche et Formation Avancée en Calcul Scientifique in France.

Roland’s scientific work falls loosely into three broad categories: (i) The numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) that originate in mechanics, physics, and the engineering sciences; (ii) optimal design and control of systems that are governed by PDEs and/or ordinary differential equations or arise from least-squares solutions of nonlinear systems; and (iii) domain decomposition and fictitious domains. More precisely, his research on PDEs yielded several iterative methods for viscoelastic fluids. This work, which allows researchers to handle free boundaries without referring to them explicitly, is the topic of his first co-authored book—Numerical Analysis of Variational Inequalities—and is famously nicknamed the Glowinski-Lions-Trémolières, or “GLT.”

In Numerical Methods for Nonlinear Variational Problems, Roland proposed iterative algorithms (conjugate gradients) with preconditioning for the generalized Stokes problem. This technique paved the way for modern supercomputing with the Navier-Stokes equations. In addition, he was the first person to understand the links between Schwarz algorithms and Lagrange multipliers—and the advantages of methods without domain overlap—as well as the first to use the formalism of mixed formulations for these problems. Around this time, he created the renowned annual Domain Decomposition Methods conference. 

In subsequent years, Roland analyzed Russian ideas on fictitious domains in an appropriate functional framework and proposed finite element discretization methods to efficiently solve problems with time-dependent geometries on a single fixed mesh. He also proposed several implementations of Lions’ Hilbert uniqueness method, particularly for the computation of periodic solutions of Maxwell's equations in frequency formulation.

Roland was scientifically active until his death, and his most recent papers extend stable methods for Navier-Stokes equations to Oldroyd flows and the Monge-Ampère equation. His natural scientific ability coupled with a relentless curiosity, patience, willingness to listen, affability, and penchant for conversation earned him an impressive international network of friends and colleagues. Roland authored 10 books and more than 450 scientific articles during his career and served on several editorial boards. He also advised numerous students and postdoctoral fellows and enjoyed watching their careers develop.

In addition to his scientific achievements, Roland will be remembered for his kindness, empathy, compassion, and unique love of others. He loved good food and fine wine and had many hobbies and interests. He possessed a keen fascination for astronomy and science fiction, and was an avid fisherman as well as a voracious reader who typically devoured several books at once.

Most importantly, Roland was dedicated to his family and his dear wife Angela of 58 years, who was his strongest supporter and cheerleader throughout his career and took an active part in all important decisions in his life. He is survived by Angela; his brother Albert; his daughters Anne Glowinski and Tania Glowinski Gonzalez; and several grandchildren. Roland will be dearly missed by his family and of course his former students, colleagues, and scientific friends.

William Fitzgibbon is a professor of mathematics and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Houston. Olivier Pironneau is professor emeritus of the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie and a member of the French Académie des Sciences.