Benjamin Zurich

PhD student at INRIA Paris

Photo personnelle

About me

After obtaining my Master's degree in numerical analysis at the university of Bern, Switzerland (thesis conducted under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Thomas Wihler), I started a PhD in applied mathematics at INRIA Paris Centre in June 2025, under the supervision of Martin Vohralík and André Harnist. My research area is the a posteriori error estimation of nonlinear elliptic PDEs, where the focus is mainly on the robustness of the estimators as well as the study of contraction and optimality of the induced adaptive finite element algorithms. I am a member of the project team SERENA.

Current work

In the ANR/DFG project "RANPDEs: Robust Adaptivity for Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations" (2025-2028), we currently investigate new approaches for designing adaptive methods for nonlinear PDEs. In order to stay as close as possible to physics, one of these approaches is to measure the error in terms of difference of energies, where the energy is the natural energy given by the underlying PDE. This makes the approach inherently coherent with the structure of the problem. The focus lies on the development of reliable and efficient a posteriori energy difference estimators, as well as on their robustness with respect to the nonlinearity. The estimators are then used to steer adaptive mesh refinement strategies, and more generally adaptive algorithms that contract the error in each iteration. In addition, we want to prove optimality not only in terms of degrees of freedom but also in terms of the total computational cost.

Short CV

09/2019 - 02/2023: Bachelor's degree of Science in Mathematics, University of Bern
09/2021 - 05/2022 and 09/2023 - 05/2024: Student assistant, Department of Mathematics, University of Bern
02/2023 - 02/2025: Master's degree of Science in Mathematics, University of Bern
06/2025 - Present: Doctoral researcher, INRIA Paris Centre

Upcoming talks

Contact

benjamin.zurich@inria.fr