Ivo Babuška, co-founder of ESRD, passed away on April 12, 2023 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

He earned his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the Technical University of Prague and his D.Sc in mathematics from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Prior to his retirement from the University of Texas at Austin, he held the Robert B. Trull Chair in Engineering.

He made important contributions to the reliability of finite element methods, the development of a general framework for finite element error estimation, and the development of the p- and hp-versions of the finite element method.

Some of his contributions, such as the realization of exponential convergence rates, superconvergent extraction of stress intensity factors and high precision regional mapping procedures, were implemented in StressCheck.

He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the European Academy of Sciences, and the Engineering Academy of the Czech Republic.

Among his numerous awards and recognitions are five honorary doctorates, the George David Birkhoff Prize from the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Congress Medal from the International Association on Computational Mechanics, the John von Neumann Medal from the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, the Bolzano Medal from the Czech Academy of Science and the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, American Mathematical Society. An asteroid, discovered in 1999, was officially named after him.

Ivo Babuška published more than 320 papers in refereed journals, more than 80 papers in conference proceedings, and eight books, most recently with Dr. Szabó for May 2021’s “Finite Element Analysis: Method, Verification and Validation, 2nd Edition“. He was invited speaker at major international conferences and member of numerous editorial boards for scientific journals.

We will miss his counsel, his unique insights and quick wit.