Hans Jörg Stetter

Hans Jörg Stetter (8 April 1930 – 27 October 2025) was a German mathematician, specialising in numerical analysis. He taught at the Technical University of Vienna starting from 1965. He established the Institute of Analysis and Scientific Computing and the university's first computing centre. He published a pioneering book, Numerical Polynomial Algebra, in 2004.

Life and career Stetter was born in Munich on 8 April 1930. He studied at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and then at the Technical University of Munich. devoted to hyperbolic partial differential equations in gas dynamics.

In the 1960s, he turned to the numerical analysis of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) In 1984 he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Stetter taught generations of students, in a style described as clear in methodology, uniting "ideas, formal rigor, and intuition".

Selected publications Articles with Friedrich L. Bauer: "Zur numerischen Fourier-Transformation", Numerische Mathematik, vol. 1, 1959, 208–220. . "Asymptotic expansions for the error in discretization algorithms for non-linear functional equations", Numerische Mathematik, vol. 7, 1965. . "Stabilizing predictors for weakly unstable correctors", Mathematics of Computation, vol. 19, 1965, 84–89. . "The defect correction principle and discretization methods", Numerische Mathematik, vol. 29, 1978, 425–433. .

Books Analysis of Discretization Methods in Ordinary Differential Equations, Springer, 1973; as editor with Klaus Böhmer: Defect correction methods, Springer, 1984; Numerical Polynomial Algebra, SIAM, 2004.