The EMS/ECMI Lanczos Prize has been awarded to the developers of FEniCS for their outstanding work in automating the development of the finite element method. FEniCS lets model developers write the variational formulation of their discretisation in a high-level language that is very close to its mathematical statement; this language is then passed to a compiler that generates the code for assembling the necessary matrices and vectors. This development was revolutionary because it made it much easier for scientists and engineers to implement a finite element discretisation for their own problem; new models could be implemented in an hour rather than in days or weeks with lower-level codes.
Congratulations to the winners!