[FabHK]

> so the impact is wide

Yeah - in Shrek (2001), there's a scene where the eponymous ogre takes a mud bath in the swamp. When I studied this linear algebra stuff, one of my (more advanced) fellow students told me that their research group had "done" the mud... :-)

[santaclaus]

Penn or Stanford? I think that was mostly Nick Foster’s work.

[FabHK]

Stanford. I thought it was Ron Fedkiv’s group, but I might easily misremember, or could’ve been a visitor. I mostly remember because it was such a random thing. The graphics people had a lot of fun, one group was working on hair, fur, and fire or so. All boils down to PDEs, discretised into massive linear systems.

[santaclaus]

Fedkiw coauthored a paper with Foster in 2001, which is about the time of Shrek, so that must have been it!