Vera Kublanovskaya

Vera Nikolaevna Kublanovskaya (nee Totubalina; November 21, 1920 – February 21, 2012) was a Russian mathematician noted for her work on developing computational methods for solving spectral problems of algebra. She proposed the QR algorithm for computing eigenvalues and eigenvectors in 1961, which has been named as one of the ten most important algorithms of the twentieth century. This algorithm was proposed independently by the English computer scientist John G.F. Francis in 1959.

Kublanovskaya was born in 1920 in Krokhona, a small village near Belozersk in Vologda Oblast, Russia. She studied mathematics at Leningrad State University and joined the Leningrad Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1948 where she worked her entire life. In her first years at the institute from 1948 to 1955, her scientific research related to nuclear reactors under the supervision of Leonid Kantorovich. Thereafter she defended her candidate's thesis, "The Application of Analytic Continuation in Numerical Methods of Analysis" in 1955. In 1972, she defended her doctoral thesis, "The Use of Orthogonal Transformations in Solving Problems of Algebra."

References

• Dongarra, Jack J.; Sullivan, Francis (2000), "Guest editors' introduction: The top 10 algorithms", Computing in Science & Engineering, 2 (1): 22–23, doi:10.1109/MCISE.2000.814652, ISSN 1521-9615.
• Golub, Gene H.; Uhlig, Frank (2009), "The QR algorithm: 50 years later – its genesis by John Francis and Vera Kublanovskaya, and subsequent developments", IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, 29 (3): 467–485, doi:10.1093/imanum/drp012, ISSN 0272-4979.
• Kon'kova, Ya.; Simonova, V.N.; Khazanov, V.B. (2000), "Vera Nikolaevna Kublanovskaya. Short Biography", Journal of Mathematical Sciences, 114 (6): 1755–56, doi:10.1023/A:1022491200674.