Developers of the FEniCS Project awarded
Twelve developers of the open-source FEniCS Project, among them Anders Logg, have been awarded the 2026 Lanczos Prize for Mathematical Software “for revolutionising the implementation of the finite element method”.
The Lanczos Prize for Mathematical Software was established in 2023 by the European Mathematical Society (EMS) and the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI). It recognises outstanding mathematical software with important applications in mathematics, science, engineering, society or industry and is restricted to software whose source code is publicly available for scrutiny.
FEniCS is one of the world’s leading open-source software platforms for finite element computing, enabling solving of partial differential equations using the finite element method. The prize committee highlighted FEniCS’ widespread use across almost every area of science and engineering, its success in addressing challenging industrial applications, and the elegant design of its domain-specific language, which allows users to implement sophisticated finite element methods with unprecedented simplicity.
Anders Logg, Professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg recounts: “It all began in 2003, when I was a PhD student at Chalmers. My fellow PhD student Johan Hoffman and I had started developing a piece of software called DOLFIN. We wanted to make it much easier to implement new finite element solvers for partial differential equations. Later that year, Johan, our supervisor Claes Johnson and I travelled to Chicago, where we met Ridgway Scott and Robert C. Kirby at the University of Chicago. They were working on similar ideas, so we decided to join forces. That was the beginning of the FEniCS Project.
The idea behind FEniCS was simple, but at the time quite radical. Writing a solver for a partial differential equation normally required an enormous amount of work and many thousands of lines of specialised code. We thought: what if we could build a machine that wrote much of that code for us? You would give it the mathematical formulation of the problem, and it would automatically generate efficient, optimised code for solving it. This allowed researchers to focus on the mathematics instead of spending so much time on the technical details of the implementation.
Today, especially with the rapid development of AI, the idea of machines generating code feels quite natural. But in 2003, using code generation in this way for advanced finite element computing was new, and it fundamentally changed how PDE solvers could be developed.
More than twenty years later, FEniCS has users all over the world, an annual conference, and publications and books that have together been cited more than 10,000 times. Receiving the Lanczos Prize is a wonderful recognition of what we set out to achieve, but also of all the people who have developed, used and contributed to FEniCS over the years. I am especially proud that something which began as an ambitious idea among a small group of researchers is still alive, evolving and helping people solve difficult problems today.”
The 2026 prize was presented on July 2 during the 23rd ECMI Conference on Industrial and Applied Mathematics in Kaunas, Lithuania.
Text: Anders Logg/from the news page of EMS