Mikko Kaasalainen

Mikko K.J. Kaasalainen (1965 – 12 April 2020) was a Finnish applied mathematician and mathematical physicist. He was professor of mathematics at the department of mathematics at Tampere University of Technology. Kaasalainen mostly worked on inverse problems and their applications especially in astrophysics, as well as on dynamical systems. i.e., the reconstruction of the shapes and spin states of asteroids from their brightness measurements (lightcurves), based on mathematical results and uniqueness and stability theorems that have been transformed into modelling algorithms with which a multitude of otherwise unresolvable asteroids can now be mapped. This method has also been used in the direct verification of the Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect in the Solar System.

Analysis of large dynamical systems, where torus construction methods in phase space allow a compact representation or approximation of the dynamics of the observed system (such as a galaxy).