James McLellan Stone is an American astrophysicist who specialises in the study of fluid dynamics. He is currently a faculty member at the school of natural sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study.[1] Stone is also the Lyman Spitzer Jr. Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics, emeritus, and professor of astrophysical sciences and applied and computational mathematics, emeritus, at Princeton University.[2]
At Princeton his research concentrated on the application of large-scale numerical simulations to study the gas dynamics in a range of astrophysical systems, from protostars to clusters of galaxies. These studies necessitated the development of advanced numerical algorithms which could be run on advanced computers. Together with Michael Norman, he developed the original ZEUS code to analyse astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) and later, with other collaborators, developed Athena, a high-order Godunov scheme for astrophysical MHD that uses the recently developed technique of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). Both these public codes are now widely used in astrophysics.[3][4]
