Research

Wolfgang Dahmen is distinguished for his foundational contributions to Constructive Approximation Theory, in particular regarding the development of Multivariate Splines and their applications to Computer Aided Geometric Design. These works were carried out mainly at the University of Bielefeld (1981-1987) and at the Free University of Berlin (1987-1992).

After moving to RWTH Aachen in 1992 he has been devoting his efforts mainly to the development of theoretical foundations of adaptive solution methods for operator equations and variational problems. The results on complexity and convergence estimates for new wavelet based adaptive methods, obtained in collaboration with A. Cohen and R. DeVore, were the first of their kind and have triggered numerous subsequent developments. In his position as a Director of International Research at the Interdisciplinary Mathematics Institute at the University of South Carolina, USA, he has focused mainly on new concepts for imaging, mathematical learning theory and compressed sensing.

Parallel to these primarily theoretical developments he has been engaged in intense collaborations with colleagues from engineering sciences at RWTH Aachen reflected by numerous funded interdisciplinary research projects. These activities have certainly coined the expansion and position of mathematics and of numerical analysis and scientific computing, in particular, in- and outside RWTH Aachen in a significant way. He has contributed substantially to the development of a new engineering curriculum that aims at strongly combining expertise in mathematics, computer science and engineering. Moreover, he has played a pivotal role in establishing the Graduate School AICES in the context of the Excellence Initiative.