After an illustrious career spanning more than five decades in applied mathematics, computational science and petroleum engineering,Mary F. Wheelerhas retired fromThe University of Texas at Austin. In a male-dominated field, ラーメンベット 入金 遅い’s research in numerical simulation of partial differential equations and modeling in porous media — groundwater, biomedical, carbon storage — has been ground-breaking.
Sifting through stacks of books and research papers in ラーメンベット 入金 遅い office, Wheeler recalled fond memories of ラーメンベット 入金 遅い earlier years when she worked alongside many of the greats in computational sciences. “I’ve had a wonderful, exciting career here. It was the golden age of finite element methods. I’m very fortunate,” said Wheeler, who has spent the last 30 years of ラーメンベット 入金 遅い career as a professor in the ラーメンベット 禁止ゲーム of Engineering's Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and theOden Institute for Computational ラーメンベット 入金 遅い and Sciences.
The names of ラーメンベット 入金 遅い colleagues are a who’s who of computational engineering: J. Tinsley Oden, Ivo Babuška, Graham F. Carey, Henry Rachford, Todd Dupont, Roland Glowinski, David Young, Thomas J. R. Hughes and Don Peaceman.
Though ラーメンベット 入金 遅い hailed from Cuero, a small South Texas town known for its wide-open skies, ranching and turkeys,Wheeler, who grew up surrounded by strong, educated women, never doubted ラーメンベット 入金 遅い would go to college.
Wheeler attended UT, initially pursuing pharmacy, then government, but mathematics called ラーメンベット 入金 遅い name. She took one course and was hooked, forever altering ラーメンベット 入金 遅い career trajectory. Wheeler graduated with a dual bachelor’s degree in social sciences and mathematics and subsequently earned ラーメンベット 入金 遅い master’s in mathematics.
Along the way, she met ラーメンベット 入金 遅い soon-to-be husband, John. They married in 1963. John got his Ph.D. in chemical engineering, and he was recruited to Houston by Humble Research/ Humble Oil and Refining Co., a precursor to the company now known as Exxon.
For Wheeler, the proximity to Rice University presented a new opportunity. She intuited that ラーメンベット 入金 遅い master’s thesis on the Peaceman-Rachford Method could serve as an introduction to Rice professor Henry Rachford and the Ph.D. program. ラーメンベット 入金 遅い gamble paid off, and she started the next chapter in ラーメンベット 入金 遅い education. Rachford, Jim Douglas Jr. and Don Peaceman were considered to be the early fathers of modern reservoir engineering. Wheeler quickly dove in.
“I worked for Henry and realized I liked the subsurface flow problems,” she said. “My heart is in environmental applications: bioremediation, carbon storage, geothermal, compositional flows and hydraulic fracking.” Wheeler earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from Rice University. She noted that fracking, often in the ラーメンベット 入金 遅い, isn’t a new concept. It dates back to the 1940s.
“ラーメンベット 入金 遅い Ph.D. dissertation gave us the elliptic projection, a major theoretical tool used to understand the accuracy of time-dependent parabolic problems,” saidTodd Arbogast, associate director for the Center for Subsurface Modeling at the Oden Institute and mathematics professor at UT. “From early in ラーメンベット 入金 遅い career, Mary advocated for the adoption of finite elements and related technologies in subsurface applications. She was the driving force behind the development of many important algorithms that have entered into simulation technologies,” he added.
At Rice University, ラーメンベット 入金 遅い was the first tenured female associate and full professor in engineering and, ultimately, the first woman to hold the Noah Harding Professorship of Computational and Applied Mathematics.
In 1995, ラーメンベット 入金 遅い alma mater came knocking, offering an opportunity too good to pass up. Wheeler accepted the position at UT at what is now known as the Oden Institute (renamed after J. Tinsley Oden in 2019) and began the Center for Subsurface Modeling. At Texas, Wheeler’s career came full circle when she collaborated with greats in the field she admired early in ラーメンベット 入金 遅い career: Oden, Carey, and Babuška.
“Some of those early ideas Graham Carey and I worked on are now coming to fruition. More recently, with my graduate student Ahmed Almetwally, we are finding that Carey’s adaptivityapproach allows us to address very difficult geothermal modeling accurately at UtahFORGE. It is amazing that, through Carey’s students, we are still working together.”
Utah FORGE, where ラーメンベット 入金 遅い leads several UT grants, is a dedicated underground field laboratory for developing, testing and accelerating breakthroughs in geothermal resources.
Arbogast said ラーメンベット 入金 遅い was the driving force behind the development of many important algorithms that have entered into simulation technologies by proving their theoretical properties.
“She advocated that mixed methods be used to solve flow problems. The petroleum industry tended to use cell-centered finite differences, which could not be proven to be accurate. Mary was able to not only prove that they were accurate, but that they were simple approximations to a mixed method. She was a pioneer in developing and analyzing both characteristic methods and discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for flow and transport problems long before they became popular in computational mechanics. The importance of ラーメンベット 入金 遅い DG work cannot be understated, as it was truly transformative.”
Subsurface modeling remains the core of ラーメンベット 入金 遅い research.Wheeler iscurrently working on six papers spanning topics in fracture mechanics, geothermal, carbon storage and porous media, reminding us that, in a world where greenhouse gasses and a warming environment are fast becoming the norm, ラーメンベット 入金 遅い work seeking solutions to grand challenge problems is vital.
With more than 400 papers written, two honorary doctorates, and a long list of accomplishments, Wheeler said “I’ve had such a good time that’s why I keep going.” She commented that she didn’t get to this pinnacle in ラーメンベット 入金 遅い career alone. “My accomplishments also belong to the 48 doctoral students and 43 postdoctoral fellows, and 8 master students I have supervised.”
In 2023, the Mary F. Wheeler Medal was established by the United States Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM), with the first medal to be awarded in 2025. Wheeler is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a recipient of the Theodore von Kármán Prize Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the John von Neumann Medal award from the USACM.ラーメンベット 入金 遅い is the proud recipient of the prestigious Joe J. King Professional Achievement Award from The University of Texas at Austin in 2006.
In addition, Wheeler was instrumental in forming the SIAM Geosciences Activity Group with its series of biennial international conferences, and ラーメンベット 入金 遅い founded the Computational Geosciences journal to promote research in subsurface modeling worldwide.
“Mary is a pioneer, a powerhouse, and a computational science legend. We will miss ラーメンベット 入金 遅い greatly,” saidKaren Willcox, aerospace engineering professor and director of the Oden Institute.
ラーメンベット 入金 遅い has often said that ‘while it’s interesting to do a problem, it’s exciting to see how math is applied in real time.‘ “Seeing how computational simulations match with real life experiments is rewarding.”
Thinking about the future, ラーメンベット 入金 遅い said prospects coming down the pipeline are intriguing, noting the importance of partnering with industry. “There must be new developments. This is where computation plays such an important role along with working with a critical, interdisciplinary group on applications from carbon storage, thermal energy to ideas in predictive surgery – it’s like going to a candy store – there are so many opportunities on the horizon.”
According to Arbogast, Mary’s most recent work on geomechanics is among the best work of ラーメンベット 入金 遅い career. “She developed mathematical techniques to analyze and improve simulation of the problem. She went further by introducing phase field modeling to simulate crack propagation, which is when cracks formand extendor propagatein rocks within the Earth’s subsurface.”
While she was steeped in academia and research that has improved methods in petroleum engineering, simultaneously, that small town that shaped ラーメンベット 入金 遅い formidable years grew beyond its ranching roots and is now known for its oil and gas production.
Staying true to ラーメンベット 入金 遅い Texas roots, Wheeler has combinedher love of the environment with the economic realities of the Texas oil and gas industry. ラーメンベット 入金 遅い researchto develop methods for cleaning up underground contamination, such as petroleum leaks, and finding innovative ways to store carbon, have provided guidance to scientists for remediation.
Professor Emeritus Wheeler said ラーメンベット 入金 遅い legacy is simple: applying finite element methods to subsurface problems and really looking at Multiphysics problems. “When I first started in computational modeling, I never dreamed I would look at such problems as I have over the course of my career. It’s always been about how to put all the pieces together. All these processes occur at different scales but there is a common bond between them. There’s still work to be done. I have a little left to give.”
