Henk van der Vorst

Who is Henk van der Vorst?

Hendrik "Henk" Albertus van der Vorst is a Dutch mathematician and Emeritus Professor of Numerical Analysis at Utrecht University. According to the Institute for Scientific Information, his paper on the Bi-CGSTAB method was the most cited paper in the field of mathematics in the 1990s. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Netherlands Academy of Technology and Innovation. In 2006 he was awarded a knighthood of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. Henk van der Vorst is a Fellow of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

His major contributions include preconditioned iterative methods, in particular the ICCG method, a version of preconditioned conjugate gradient method, the Bi-CGSTAB and GMRESR Krylov subspace methods and the Jacobi-Davidson method for solving ordinary, generalized, and nonlinear eigenproblems. He has analyzed convergence behavior of the conjugate gradient and Lanczos methods. He has also developed a number of preconditioners for parallel computers, including truncated Neumann series preconditioner, incomplete twisted factorizations, and the incomplete factorization based on the so-called "vdv" ordering.