Robert McLachlan

Robert Iain McLachlan (born 1964) is a New Zealand mathematician and Distinguished Professor in the School of Fundamental Sciences, Massey University, New Zealand.

Academic career McLachlan was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1964, and studied mathematics at the University of Canterbury, graduating with a BSc (Hons) First Class in 1984. One formative experience was in his last year of high school, where he had free rein to experiment with assembly language programming on the school PDP-11/10. In 2007 he won the prestigious Germund Dahlquist Prize, the first mathematician from the southern hemisphere to do so. From 2008 to 2012, along with Stephen Marsland and Matt Perlmutter, he worked on a Marsden grant project "Geodesics in diffeomorphism groups: geometry and applications", designing efficient numerical integrators that preserved the geometric properties of systems. In 2013, McLachlan was the LMS-NZMS Aitken Lecturer, delivering talks on geometric numerical integration to six UK universities.

McLachlan is a Fellow of the New Zealand Mathematical Society (NZMS), and in 1998 organised the first of the annual Manawatu-Wellington Applied Mathematics Conferences. He was president of the NZMS in 2008–2009 and vice president in 2010, and edited the New Zealand Journal of Mathematics for six years.

Research McLachlan is a world leader in the field of geometric integration, a technique for the reliable simulation of large-scale complex systems, and in particular the use of symplectic techniques in the numerical analysis of differential equations. This field, which McLachlan helped found in the 1990s, builds into its approach the underlying geometric structure of data sets. For example, during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, using geometric integration models, correctly predicted the hurricane would suddenly turn 90 degrees towards New York six days in advance. Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (2002) NZ Association of Scientists Research Medal (2003) Research fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK

Science communication As an advocate for action on climate change McLachlan writes frequently for the public, in media like Scientific American 's blog, the blog Planetary Ecology and the Royal Society Te Apārangi's Sciblogs. His writing focuses on consequences of climate change, electric cars, and climate policy.

Selected research