James H. Wilkinson

For other persons named James Wilkinson, see James Wilkinson (disambiguation).

James Hardy Wilkinson
Born	September 27, 1919(1919-09-27) Strood, England
Died	October 5, 1986 (aged 67)
Nationality	English
Fields	Numerical Analysis
Institutions	National Physical Laboratory
Notable awards	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." In the same year, he also gave the John von Neumann Lecture at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

[edit] See also

O'Connor, John J. & Robertson, Edmund F., “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)
Photo of Wilkinson from Nick Higham's archive

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Perlis (1966) · Wilkes (1967) · Hamming (1968) · Minsky (1969) · Wilkinson (1970) · McCarthy (1971) · Dijkstra (1972) · Bachman (1973) · Knuth (1974) · Newell / Simon (1975) · Rabin / Scott (1976) · Backus (1977) · Floyd (1978) · Iverson (1979) · Hoare (1980) · Codd (1981) · Cook (1982) · Thompson / Ritchie (1983) · Wirth (1984) · Karp (1985) · Hopcroft / Tarjan (1986) · Cocke (1987) · Sutherland (1988) · Kahan (1989) · Corbató (1990) · Milner (1991) · Lampson (1992) · Hartmanis / Stearns (1993) · Feigenbaum / Reddy (1994) · Blum (1995) · Pnueli (1996) · Engelbart (1997) · Gray (1998) · Brooks (1999) · Yao (2000) · Dahl / Nygaard (2001) · Rivest / Shamir / Adleman (2002) · Kay (2003) · Cerf / Kahn (2004) · Naur (2005) · Allen (2006) · Clarke / Emerson / Sifakis (2007)