James H. Wilkinson
| James Hardy Wilkinson | |
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| Born | September 27, 1919 Strood, England |
| Died | October 5, 1986 (aged 67) Teddington, England |
| 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.
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[edit] Early life
Born in Strood, England, he attended the Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School in Rochester. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated as Senior Wrangler, or top of the class.
[edit] Career
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.
[edit] Recognition
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.
The J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software is named in his honour.
[edit] Personal life
He married Heather Ware in 1945. They had a son.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: James H. Wilkinson |
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "James H. Wilkinson", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Wilkinson.html.
- 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
- Fox, L. (December 1987). "James Hardy Wilkinson". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (The Royal Society) 33: 671–708. JSTOR 769967.
