The mathematician who moves ideas between weather and insulin

Andrew Stuart has moved between countries, between mathematics and engineering, and between abstract theory and the physical world, with posts at Caltech, Stanford, MIT, Warwick and Bath. At NYU he holds appointments at the Courant Institute and Tandon. “I like the abstraction,” he says, “and the way that it links different things together.”

His best-known territory is data assimilation, the mathematics that merges equations of physical processes with streams of observations from satellites, aircraft and balloons, the way modern weather forecasts do. He asked where else the same ideas might work, and found climate modelling and even models of the human glucose-insulin system. His second theme is inverse problems, which run the logic backward: start from what you observe and work out what caused it.