Florian Schäfer

I’m Florian Schäfer, assistant professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.

I received my PhD in applied and computational mathematics at Caltech, working with Houman Owhadi. Before that, I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mathematics at the University of Bonn.

My research interests lie at the interface of numerical computation, statistical inference, and competitive games. With my students and collaborators, I have developed state-of-the-art solvers for elliptic PDEs by relating Gaussian elimination to conditional independence, efficient algorithms for multi-agent optimization, and information geometric regularization, the first inviscid regularization of compressible fluid dynamics.

My work has found applications in materials science, turbulence modeling, computer graphics, and computational geometry. Most recently, it has enabled the first compressible fluid simulation to exceed one quadrillion degrees of freedom. This work is a 2025 Gordon Bell Prize finalist.

My current research focus is on developing information geometric mechanics that uses the statistical physical underpinnings of continuum mechanics to design structure preserving numerical methods at the macroscale.

I am currently hiring PhD students in this topic. Please have a look here to get an idea. If you have a strong background in computational mathematics, reach out!