2 July 2026

Developers of the FEniCS Project awarded the 2026 EMS/ECMI Lanczos Prize

Markus Juvonen

The developers of the open-source FEniCS Project have been awarded the 2026 EMS/ECMI Lanczos Prize for Mathematical Software in recognition of their revolutionary contributions to the implementation of the finite element method.

The European Mathematical Society (EMS) and the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) are pleased to announce that the developers of the FEniCS Project have been awarded the 2026 EMS/ECMI Lanczos Prize for Mathematical Software.

The prize recognises their revolutionary contributions to the implementation of the finite element method through the development of FEniCS, one of the world's leading open-source software platforms for finite element computing. Over more than two decades, the project has become an indispensable tool in research, education and industrial applications across a broad range of scientific disciplines.

The award recognises the contributions of:

Martin S. Alnæs
Igor A. Baratta
Joseph P. Dean
Jørgen S. Dokken
Michal Habera
Jack S. Hale
Anders Logg
Chris N. Richardson
Marie E. Rognes
Matthew W. Scroggs
Nathan Sime
Garth N. Wells

Developers of the FEniCS Project, recipients of the 2026 EMS/ECMI Lanczos Prize. Image courtesy of the FEniCS team.

About the Lanczos Prize

Established in 2023 by EMS and ECMI, the EMS/ECMI Lanczos Prize for Mathematical Software recognises outstanding mathematical software with important applications in mathematics, science, engineering, society or industry. The prize is awarded to a mathematician or scientist, or to a group of mathematicians and scientists, and is restricted to software whose source code is publicly available for scrutiny.

The award consists of a certificate and a cash prize of €3000. The 2026 prize will be presented during the 23rd ECMI Conference on Industrial and Applied Mathematics in Kaunas, Lithuania, where representatives of the FEniCS team will present their work.

Why the committee selected FEniCS

The 2026 prize recognises the FEniCS Project, an open-source platform for solving partial differential equations using the finite element method. By allowing researchers to express finite element formulations in a language that closely mirrors mathematical notation while automatically generating efficient computational code, FEniCS has transformed the way advanced numerical models are developed and implemented.

According to the Prize Committee, chaired by Patrick Farrell, the decision to award this year's prize was driven by the remarkable scientific, technological and real-world impact impact of the project. The 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.

"The prize committee was very impressed by several aspects of the software – its wide use across almost every area of science and engineering, its employment in solving difficult industrial problems, and the beautiful user code enabled by the UFL domain-specific language and its associated compiler."

The committee concluded that FEniCS has fundamentally changed the implementation of modern finite element methods:

"It makes it possible for researchers to implement new finite element discretisations with abstractions that match the mathematics very closely, and require an order of magnitude less code than conventional approaches."

Recognition for an international community

In response to our questions, the FEniCS development team described receiving the Lanczos Prize as both an honour and a source of motivation for the future development of the project.

"We’re delighted to receive the Lanczos Prize. It means a lot to be recognised for the difference that FEniCS has made to research and to a wide community of users. The recognition is very motivating for developers of FEniCS to continue its development with new ideas and features, and to reach ever wider groups."

The developers believe that the award recognises far more than a software package. They see it as a tribute to the international community of researchers, developers and users who have shaped FEniCS over more than two decades.

"We’re proudest of the reach that FEniCS has across research, industry and education, and the strength of the community that has developed around it. FEniCS has been developed for over 20 years now (and in many ways is unrecognisable from when it started), and over that time has sustained an evolving, international group of active and committed developers and contributors, who support both FEniCS development and the user community."

The team describes the project as a combination of a long-term vision for mathematical software and continuous dialogue with its users.

"The community has always been central to the shaping of FEniCS. Its success is built on being useful and valuable to a community of users. FEniCS is a combination of a vision for what ideas and approaches we believe will make a difference, and a manifestation of requests and suggestions from the community."

Ideas that changed finite element software

Reflecting on the development of FEniCS, the team highlighted several innovations that fundamentally changed the way finite element software can be developed and used. One of the earliest was the introduction of a domain-specific language for representing finite element problems at a high level of abstraction while closely mirroring their mathematical formulation. From these high-level descriptions, FEniCS automatically generates efficient computational implementations.

"It was possible to express problems concisely and quickly at a high level, and from this automatically create computer code that was fast."

Another important milestone was the introduction of a Python interface, long before Python became as widely adopted in scientific computing as it is today. This significantly lowered the barrier to entry, allowing researchers to write concise, readable programs that closely resemble their mathematical models while benefiting from efficient automatically generated code underneath.

Looking ahead

Although the Lanczos Prize recognises more than twenty years of development, the FEniCS team sees many exciting opportunities ahead. One of the team's current priorities is enabling high-performance GPU computing while preserving the mathematical abstraction that has always characterised the project.

"We’re really excited about our developments for using GPUs, where we aim to retain the mathematical abstraction that characterise FEniCS yet provide class-leading performance. Achieving good performance from GPUs is not easy, even for experts, and it’s too much to expect all experts in PDEs, finite element method and applications to also be experts in algorithms and programming for GPUs."

The developers are equally enthusiastic about the growing ecosystem that is emerging around FEniCS, as researchers continue to build new methods and applications on top of the platform.