Spectral Methods in Chemistry and Physics

Bernard Shizgal was born in 1942 in Montreal, Canada.  He received a B.Sc. in Honours Chemistry and Physics from McGill University in 1964, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Columbia University in 1968 under the supervision of Martin Karplus. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Physics at Leiden University in the Netherlands with Peter Mazur, and in Chemistry at the University of British Columbia with Bob Snider before his appointment there as an Assistant Professor in 1970. His interests in kinetic theory naturally lead to research projects in space physics and the implementation of pseudospectral methods.  On numerous occasions he was a Fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science and a visiting Professor at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, the Solar Terrestrial Environment Laboratory of Nagoya University and other institutes in Japan. His interests in mathematics and spectral methods were pursued as a visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics, at the Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis  and at the Institut Nonlinèare de Nice,  France.  Professor Shizgal has approximately 140 publications in peer-reviewed journals. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia and remains active with research projects in kinetic theory and quantum mechanics, with applications to atmospheric and space science, stochastic processes, rarefied gas dynamics and pseudospectral methods.

• Preface.- Introduction to Spectral/Pseudospectral Methods.- Polynomial Basis functions and Quadratures.- Numerical Evaluation of Integrals and Derivatives.- Representation of Functions in Basis Sets.- Integral Equations in the Kinetic Theory of Gases and Related Topics.- Spectral and Pseudospectral Methods of Solution of the Fokker-Planck and Schrödinger Equations.- Index.