Jacobi Resurrected

A grad student-professor pair at Johns Hopkins University has improved upon the Jacobi iterative method, making it 200 times faster and, perhaps, newly suitable for applications in aerospace design, climate modeling, and fluid mechanics.

Unveiled in 1845 by German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacobi as a means of solving systems of linear equations by starting with a guess and then repeating a series of operations over and over until a useful solution appeared, the method fell out of favor once faster ways of performing the necessary calculations were developed.

What Xiang Yang and Rajat Mittal have done, though, is speed it up.

“I expect this to be adopted very quickly,” Mittal says of the revised method. “Everyone is competing for access to powerful computer systems, and the new Jacobi method will save time.