J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software

The J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software is awarded every four years to honor outstanding contributions in the field of numerical software. The award is named to commemorate the outstanding contributions of James H. Wilkinson in the same field. ^[1]

The award, consisting of US $3000 and a trophy, is jointly presented every four years by the Argonne National Laboratory, the National Physical Laboratory and the Numerical Algorithms Group.

Eligibility and Selection Criteria

The winner must be at most 40 years of age as of January 1 of the year of the award. The award is given on the basis of:

• Clarity of the software implementation and documentation.
• Clarity of the paper accompanying the entry.
• Portability, reliability, efficiency and usability of the software implementation.
• Depth of analysis of the algorithm and the software.
• Importance of application addressed by the software.
• Quality of the test software

Winners

Source: Numerical Algorithms Group

1991

The first prize in 1991 was awarded to Linda Petzold for DASSL, a differential algebraic equation solver. This code is available in the public domain here.

1995

The 1995 prize was awarded to Chris Bischof and Alan Carle for ADIFOR 2.0, an automatic differentiation tool for Fortran 77 programs. The code is available for educational and non-profit research here.

1999

The 1999 prize was awarded to Matteo Frigo and Steven G. Johnson for FFTW, a C library for computing the discrete Fourier transform.

2003

The 2003 prize was awarded to Jonathan Shewchuk for Triangle, a two-dimensional mesh generator and Delaunay Triangulator. It is freely available here.

2007

The 2007 prize was awarded to Wolfgang Bangerth, Guido Kanschat, and Ralf Hartmann for deal.II, a software library for computational solution of partial differential equations using adaptive finite elements. It is freely available here.

2011

Andreas Waechter (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center) and Carl Laird (Texas A&M University) have been awarded the 2011 prize for IPOPT, an object-oriented library for solving large-scale continuous optimization problems. It is freely available here.

References

• Official Website.