Discretization is seen as a reduction preserving the essential physical content of the continuum formulation. What is the thermodynamics involved in such reduction?
 

Miroslav Grmela is a theoretical physicist working in the domain of multiscale thermodynamics (equilibrium, nonequilibrium, and statistical) and in continuum mechanics and kinetic theory of complex fluids. He received his PhD from Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He worked in the Nuclear Research Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, at École Polytechnique in Montrèal, and as a visiting professor, at Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, ETH in Zürich, UNAM in Mexico, and Universitat Autonoma de Barcelone in Barcelona. In 1996 he organized the first International Workshop of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics (IWNET). Sevenths IWNET workshop took place in Holland in 2015. In 1983, Miroslav Grmela initiated a systematic investigation of an abstract multiscale thermodynamics that is seen, from the physical point of view, as a theory of relations among different levels of description of macroscopic systems, and from the mathematical point of view, as a combination of symplectic and gradient dynamics that is put into the context of contact geometry. Miroslav Grmela is an author of more than 200 scientific publications. In 2014 he received a prize (Accelerator Research Grant) from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.