Joseph Oliger

Joseph E. Oliger (September 3, 1941 – August 28, 2005) was an American computer scientist and professor at Stanford University. Oliger was the co-founder of the Science in Computational and Mathematical Engineering degree program at Stanford, and served as the director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science.

Early life and education Oliger was born in Indiana in 1941, the son of salesman Emmert Oliger and homemaker Catherine Oliger, and grew up on a farm in Greensburg, Indiana. Oliger graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with a B.S. in mathematics in 1966, and later continued on to complete an M.S. in applied math in 1971.

From 1965 to 1973, Oliger worked as a computer programmer and analyst at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Along with Marsha Berger and Philip Colella, Oliger developed the technique of adaptive mesh refinement. One adaptive mesh refinement algorithm first developed by Berger and Oliger, and later refined by Berger and Colella, is taught today and referred to as the Berger-Oliger or Berger-Oliger-Colella method.

Stanford University In 1974, Oliger joined the Computer Science department at Stanford University as an assistant professor.

Oliger was the author of the widely used textbook, Time-Dependent Problems and Difference Methods, with Bertil Gustafsson and Heinz-Otto Kreiss.

Oliger served as the director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science in the 1990s.

In 2001, Oliger retired from Stanford.