Petra Vuković

Petra Vuković is a numerical analyst working on the solution of differential equations in scientific computing. Her work centres on the systems that resist the standard toolchain: stiff problems whose explicit step is bounded by stability rather than accuracy; systems that arrive with a mass matrix and refuse to be written as an explicit derivative; differential-algebraic models whose index must be reduced before any solver can touch them; and the stochastic, delayed, and hybrid dynamics that sit outside the conventional interface entirely.

She is preoccupied with a distinction she believes the field routinely blurs — the difference between a tool that is slow and a tool that cannot express the problem. The first is an engineering inconvenience and invites an argument about hardware. The second is a structural fact and ends the conversation. Most of her writing is an attempt to establish which of the two is actually on the table, and she is unwilling to claim the second where only the first is true.

Her methodological commitments are unfashionably strict. She will not report a timing without a tolerance, will not accept a converged-looking solution she has not checked against a manufactured one, and will not publish a comparison in which the competing tool was configured by someone who wanted it to lose. She regards a scrupulously fair benchmark as the sharpest available instrument, precisely because its conclusions cannot be dismissed. She works independently, without institutional affiliation.