People

Professor Stone's primary research area is in the use of computational methods to study the fluid dynamics of various astrophysical systems. This often requires the development of novel numerical algorithms for solving the coupled partial differential equations that describe magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD), radiation transfer, self-gravity, and relativistic flows. Many of the numerical algorithms that Stone and his research group construct are designed for high-performance parallel computers and produce terabytes of four-dimensional data. Visualization of scalar and vector fields on regular and nested grids is an integral part of the effort.

Much of Professor Stone's work focuses on problems in theoretical astrophysics concerning star formation, and accretion flows onto black holes and neutron stars. One unifying physical phenomena in these studies is the dynamics of MHD turbulence. By creating computer models that simulate MHD turbulence, Stone and his research group are able to study such properties as the power spectrum and decay rate of the turbulence, and to understand the implication of these results for star formation in molecular clouds.

After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1990, Prof. Stone was a NSF postdoctoral research fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (also at the UI). He then joined the faculty in the astronomy department at the University of Maryland. He helped develop, and was the Associate Director, of the computational and applied mathematics program at the UMd. Stone was elected to the Professorship of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge, England in 2002, and joined the faculty at Princeton as a full professor in 2003.

Stone holds a joint appointment within the department of Astrophysical Sciences and PACM. He teaches graduate course on computational methods, an introductory course to modern astronomy, and a course on differential equations. He is an undergraduate advisor in Wilson College, the director of graduate studies in the Dept. of Astrophysical Sciences, and the Associate Chair of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences.

PACM Students advised: Michael Sekora