Nanotech Modeling Wins Mathematician START Prize

Clemens Heitzinger has won the prestigious START Prize, awarded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, for a research project titled "Partial-Differential-Equations Models for Nanotechnology."

Nanowire sensors can be used to detect tumor markers or toxic carbon monoxide gas, and Heitzinger hopes to use differential equations and systems of them to model such sensors and develop efficient numerical algorithms for realistic simulations. Simulations save researchers time and money.

Heitzinger says of his work:

The beauty of mathematics is that our mathematical models and results are very abstract and, hence, they are applicable to various different applications. Our mathematical results make it possible to calculate what could not be calculated before.