Chia-Kun Chu

Chia-Kun (John) Chu (Chinese: 朱家琨; pinyin: Zhū Jiākūn) is a Chinese-American applied mathematician who is the Fu Foundation Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at Columbia University. He has been on Columbia faculty since 1965 and served as the department chairman of applied physics and nuclear engineering three times (1982–1983, 1985–1988, 1995–1997).

Chu received a bachelor's in Mechanic Engineering from Chiao-Tung University in 1948, a master's from Cornell University in 1950, and a Ph.D. from Courant Institute, New York University in 1959.

He is an internationally recognized applied mathematician and one of the pioneers of computational mathematics in fluid dynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, and shock waves. He has developed approximations to the differential equations of fluid dynamics and coined the term "computational fluid dynamics".

Chu received numerous honors. He was a recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship and was elected fellow of American Physical Society and fellow of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Columbia University in 2006.

He was the brother-in-law of Z.Y. Fu, a Columbia donor who gave his name for the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.