James H. Wilkinson

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James Hardy Wilkinson

Born	September 27, 1919 Strood, England
Died	October 5, 1986
Field	Numerical Analysis
Institution	National Physical Laboratory
Notable prizes	Turing Award

James Hardy Wilkinson (27 September 1919 – 5 October 1986) was a prominent figure in the field of numerical analysis, a field at the boundary of applied mathematics and computer science particularly useful to physics and engineering.

Born in Strood, England, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated top of the class. Taking up war work in 1940, he began working on ballistics but transferred to the National Physical Laboratory in 1946, where he worked with Alan Turing on the ACE computer project.

Later, Wilkinson's interests took him into the numerical analysis field, where he discovered many significant algorithms.

He received the Turing Award in 1970 "for his research in numerical analysis to facilitate the use of the high-speed digital computer, having received special recognition for his work in computations in linear algebra and 'backward' error analysis."

[edit] See also

• Wilkinson's polynomial

[edit] External links and sources

• O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "James H. Wilkinson". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
• James H. Wilkinson, Turing's Work at the National Physical Laboratory and the Construction of Pilot ACE, DEUCE and ACE (in Nicholas Metropolis, J. Howlett, Gian-Carlo Rota, (editors), A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, Academic Press, New York, 1980)