Sumedh Joshi was a brilliant and very promising young Applied Mathematician and wonderful person who, unfortunately, passed away suddenly and too soon in late August 2016, three months after receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell CAM.

In this presentation, as Sumedh’s friend and former thesis advisor, I will attempt to tell a story on his thesis work and my experience of him as a human being. The primary motivation for his research was the simulation of the propagation and destabilization into turbulence of internal solitary waves in stratified waters in long domains with variable bathymetry typical of the coastal ocean and lakes. The computational foundation of his research are discontinuous higher-order-element based techniques for the solution of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The first part of my talk will present the essential components of a novel Schur-complement-based algorithm built by Sumedh to solve the highly challenging pressure Poisson equation in a highly efficient fashion, based on a two-level deflation-driven preconditioner.

The second part of the talk will discuss a brilliantly-conceived singular-value-decomposition-based postprocessing technique for the associated pressure projection operator. Anybody who has known Sumedh would be well aware that he would love to have the scientific narrative of such a presentation regularly interrupted with random stories of any kind. I will attempt to do exactly that by offering snippets on his lovably sarcastic sense of humor, his thoughtful views on the human condition and his obsession with music, running, sports and basketball in particular.