James H. Wilkinson
| Jim Wilkinson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
James Hardy Wilkinson 27 September 1919 Strood, England |
| Died |
5 October 1986 (aged 67) Teddington, England |
| Nationality | English |
| Fields | Numerical Analysis |
| Institutions | National Physical Laboratory[1] |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Known for | |
| Notable awards |
|
James Hardy Wilkinson FRS[2] (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.[3][4][5]
Education
Born in Strood, England, he attended the Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School in Rochester. He studied the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated as Senior Wrangler.[6]
Career
Taking up war work in 1940, he began working on ballistics but transferred to the National Physical Laboratory[1] in 1946, where he worked with Alan Turing on the ACE[7] computer project. Later, Wilkinson's interests took him into the numerical analysis field, where he discovered many significant algorithms.
Awards and honours
Wilkinson 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 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) John von Neumann Lecture.
Wilkinson also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1973.[8]
The J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software is named in his honour.
Personal life
Wilkinson married Heather Ware in 1945. She and their son survived him, a daughter having predeceased him.
Selected works
- Wilkinson, James Hardy (1963). Rounding Errors in Algebraic Processes (1 ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA: Prentice-Hall, Inc. ISBN 9780486679990. MR 161456. (REAP)
- Wilkinson, James Hardy (1965). The Algebraic Eigenvalue Problem. Monographs on Numerical Analysis (1 ed.). Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press. Retrieved 2016-02-11. (AEP)
- with Christian Reinsch: Handbook for Automatic Computation, Volume II, Linear Algebra, Springer-Verlag, 1971
- The Perfidious Polynomial. In: Studies in Numerical Analysis, pp. 1–28, MAA Stud. Math., 24, Math. Assoc. America, Washington, DC, 1984
References
- 1 2 Wilkinson, J. H. (1961). "Error Analysis of Direct Methods of Matrix Inversion". Journal of the ACM. 8 (3): 281. doi:10.1145/321075.321076.
- 1 2 Fox, L. (1987). "James Hardy Wilkinson 27 September 1919-5 October 1986". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 33: 670–708. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1987.0024.
- ↑ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "James H. Wilkinson", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
- ↑ James H. Wilkinson author profile page at the ACM Digital Library
- ↑ James Hardy Wilkinson at DBLP Bibliography Server
- ↑ "Easily at the top of the First Class", from the MacTutor biography.
- ↑ Wilkinson, James H. (1980). "Turing's Work at the National Physical Laboratory and the Construction of Pilot ACE, DEUCE and ACE". In Metropolis, Nicholas; Howlett, J.; Rota, Gian-Carlo. A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century. Academic Press. ISBN 0124916503.
- ↑ webperson@hw.ac.uk. "Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh: Honorary Graduates". www1.hw.ac.uk. Retrieved 2016-04-07.
External links
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- Photo of Wilkinson from Nick Higham's archive