Prof. em. Dr. Christian Hafner

Christian Hafner is currently a group leader in the field of Computational Electromagnetics at the IEF of ETH. In 1999 he was given the title of Professor.

Born on March 3, 1952 as a citizen of Winterthur (Switzerland), he was a student at the Department of Electrical Engineering of ETH. In 1980 he got his PhD under the direction of Prof. H. Baggenstos at the IFH with a proposition of a new method for computational electromagnetics, the Multiple Multipole Program (MMP). This method was also the main part of his habilitation in 1987 and obtained a Seymour Cray award for scientific computing in 1990.

The focus of his current research is on the improvement, optimization, and generalization of numerical techniques of computational electromagnetics; the design of intelligent optimization procedures based on evolutionary and genetic strategies; methods for the analysis and extrapolation of data sets such as time series prediction; and animated representation of electromagnetic fields. His work was published in over 100 international journals and conferences publications, as well as in several books. Furthermore, his 2D-MMP, 3D-MMP, and MaX-1 codes were published as book-software packages. MaX-1 is now available as OpenSource project OpenMaXwell.