Alfio Quarteroni receives Gauss-Newton Medal
Alfio Quarteroni © 2026 EPFL
EPFL Emeritus Professor Alfio Quarteroni has received the 2026 Gauss-Newton Medal, the highest distinction awarded by the International Association for Computational Mechanics, recognizing his sustained contributions to computational mechanics.
The Gauss-Newton Medal is the highest award of the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM). Presented every two years, it recognizes researchers who have made outstanding and sustained contributions to computational mechanics over a substantial part of their careers. Its name reflects the interplay between mathematics, numerical analysis and the mathematical modelling of physical phenomena that underpins much of the field.
The 2026 Gauss-Newton Medal has been awarded to Alfio Quarteroni, Professor Emeritus at EPFL and Politecnico di Milano. The award was presented on 20 July at the opening ceremony of the 17th World Congress on Computational Mechanics and the 10th European Conference on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering (WCCM-ECCOMAS 2026) in Munich, Germany.
Quarteroni spent nearly two decades at EPFL, where he held the Chair of Modelling and Scientific Computing from 1998 to 2017. In 2010, he founded EPFL’s Mathematics Institute of Computational Science and Engineering (MATHICSE) and served as its first director until 2015. He is also the founder of the MOX Laboratory at Politecnico di Milano, where he is Professor Emeritus, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
His research spans mathematical modelling, numerical analysis and scientific computing, with applications including fluid dynamics, geophysics, cardiovascular modelling and sports engineering. His group contributed mathematical modelling and optimization to the early Solar Impulse aircraft and to the Alinghi sailing team, winner of the America’s Cup in 2003 and 2007. Quarteroni is the author of 25 books and more than 400 scientific papers.
The Gauss-Newton Medal adds to a series of major international distinctions received by Quarteroni in recent years, including the 2022 Euler Medal from ECCOMAS, the 2023 ICIAM Lagrange Prize, the 2024 Blaise Pascal Medal in Mathematics from the European Academy of Sciences, the 2024 Ritz-Galerkin Medal from ECCOMAS, the 2025 Ralph E. Kleinman Prize from SIAM and the 2026 Olof B. Widlund Prize.