Jianfeng Lu, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Mathematics

Contact Info:

Office Location:	242 Physics
Office Phone:	(919) 660-2875
Email Address:
Web Page:	http://www.math.duke.edu/~jianfeng/

Office Hours:

Tuesday 12:30-1:20pm and 2:45pm to 4:30pm or by email appointments

Education:

Ph.D.	Princeton University	2009
BS	Peking University	2005

Specialties:

Applied Math

Research Interests:

Mathematical analysis and algorithm development for problems from
computational physics, theoretical chemistry, materials science and others.

More specifically:
Electronic structure and many body problems;
Multiscale modeling and analysis; and
Rare events and sampling techniques.

Areas of Interest:

Applied Mathematics
Partial Differential Equations
Probability
Numerical Analysis
Scientific Computing

Curriculum Vitae

Current Ph.D. Students  

• Kyle Thicke  
• Chao Xu  

Postdocs Mentored

• Haizhao Yang (July, 2015 - present)  
• Zhennan Zhou (August, 2014 - present)  

Undergraduate Research Supervised

• Jeremy Tay (September, 2015 - December, 2015)  
• Fuchsia Chen (January, 2015 - September, 2015)  
• Leslie Lei (May, 2013 - May, 2014)  

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. Zhu, G; Bierman, J; Lu, J; Li, Y, Quantum circuit for non-unitary linear transformation of basis sets, Npj Quantum Information, vol. 11 no. 1 (December, 2025) [doi]  [abs]
2. Chen, Z; Lu, J; Lu, Y; Zhang, X, FULLY DISCRETIZED SOBOLEV GRADIENT FLOW FOR THE GROSS-PITAEVSKII EIGENVALUE PROBLEM, Mathematics of Computation, vol. 94 no. 356 (November, 2025), pp. 2723-2760 [doi]  [abs]
3. He, Y; Balasubramanian, K; Sriperumbudur, BK; Lu, J, Regularized Stein Variational Gradient Flow, Foundations of Computational Mathematics, vol. 25 no. 4 (August, 2025), pp. 1199-1257 [doi]  [abs]
4. Triplett, L; Lu, J, Diffusion methods for generating transition paths, Journal of Computational Physics, vol. 522 (February, 2025) [doi]  [abs]
5. Rohatgi, D; Marwah, T; Lipton, ZC; Lu, J; Moitra, A; Risteski, A, Towards characterizing the value of edge embeddings in Graph Neural Networks, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, vol. 267 (January, 2025), pp. 51905-51923  [abs]