Theory and experiments have driven science forward for centuries. The explosion of computational power gives us a new way to increase our knowledge through numerical simulations. This is an exciting era of scientific computing!

Martijn Anthonissen works in the Computational Illumination Optics group at TU/e. The basic goal in illumination optics is to design an optical system that turns a given light source and into a desired light output. Typical applications are LED lighting, road lights and car headlights.

The industry standard is to design an optical system, use ray tracing to test it, change the design, ray trace and so on. This is quite a slow process.

The Computational illumination Optics group develops inverse methods that directly compute the required optical system. These methods are based on advanced physical models describing the interaction of light with lenses and reflectors. The ultimate goal is to develop advanced simulation tools that can be used for virtual prototyping.

Before joining the optics group, Martijn has worked on many applications, such as combustion, glass sintering, transport of tracers in anisotropic turbulence, film cooling, laser surface remelting, wafer positioning, lens deformation, cathodic protection for ships and wind-farm aerodynamics.

Martijn Anthonissen studied mathematics at TU/e. After his master’s program he was selected for the Japan Prizewinners Program, a one-year postgraduate course for twenty recently graduated Dutch students. Within this framework he lived in Tokyo and worked at the Hitachi Group Headquarters for seven months.

Upon returning to the Netherlands, Martijn started a PhD research on numerical combustion. He currently works in the Computational Illumination Optics group. Martijn has made several extended research visits abroad and worked at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut, USA), Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (Berlin, Germany), Japan Women’s University (Tokyo, Japan), National Institute of Technology Karnataka (Surathkal, India) and Università degli Studi di Perugia (Perugia, Italy).

Martijn teaches a variety of mathematics courses. He has been involved with TU/e’s teacher training program in mathematics (Eindhoven School of Education) and with the educational management of the graduate program in Industrial and Applied Mathematics.