Mikko Kaasalainen

Mikko K.J. Kaasalainen is a Finnish applied mathematician and mathematical physicist. He is currently professor of mathematics at the department of mathematics at Tampere University of Technology. Kaasalainen has mostly worked on inverse problems and their applications especially in astrophysics, as well as on dynamical systems.

Education and career

Kaasalainen received an MSc in theoretical physics at the University of Helsinki in 1990, moving shortly afterwards to Merton College, Oxford where he completed his DPhil in theoretical physics in 1994, supervised by James Binney. After a series of post-doctoral and senior positions in Europe, he moved to the University of Helsinki and to his present institute in 2009. He leads a research group in the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Inverse Problems Research.

Kaasalainen was awarded the first Pertti Lindfors prize of the Finnish Inverse Problems Society in 2001. The asteroid 16007 Kaasalainen is named in his honour.

Research

Kaasalainen's research interests mostly focus on mathematical modelling in various fields ranging from remote sensing and space research to planetary and galactic dynamics. Typically, the models and mathematical methods Kaasalainen has developed with his colleagues are connected with inverse problems. Two such topics feature prominently in Kaasalainen's research:

• Asteroid lightcurve inversion,^[1] i.e., the reconstruction of the shapes and spin states of asteroids from their brightness measurements (lightcurves), based on mathematical results and uniqueness and stability theorems^[2][3][4] that have been transformed into modelling algorithms with which a multitude of otherwise unresolvable asteroids can now be mapped.^[5][6] This method has also been used in the direct verification of the Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect in our solar system.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]}

• Analysis of large dynamical systems, where torus construction methods^[17][18] in phase space allow a compact representation or approximation of the dynamics of the observed system (such as a galaxy).

References

External links

• Mikko Kaasalainen's homepage at the University of Helsinki
• Asteroid model website at the Charles University in Prague
• Finnish Centre of Excellence in Inverse Problems Research