James H. Wilkinson

James Wilkinson
Born	James Hardy Wilkinson (1919-09-27)27 September 1919 Strood, England
Died	5 October 1986(1986-10-05) (aged 67) Teddington, England
Nationality	English
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
Known for	Wilkinson matrix Wilkinson's polynomial
Awards	Chauvenet Prize (1987) ACM Turing Award (1970) FRS (1969)[1]
Scientific career
Fields	Numerical analysis Numerical linear algebra
Institutions	National Physical Laboratory[2]

James Hardy Wilkinson FRS^[1] (27 September 1919 – 5 October 1986) was a British expert in the field of numerical analysis.^[3] His name is used for the "James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing" and "J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software" given by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Career

He transferred to the National Physical Laboratory^[2] in 1946, where he worked with Alan Turing.^[4] Later, Wilkinson's interests took him into numerical analysis, where he discovered many great algorithms.

Selected works

• Wilkinson, James Hardy (1963). Rounding Errors in Algebraic Processes (1 ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA: Prentice-Hall, Inc. ISBN 9780486679990. MR 0161456. (REAP)
• Wilkinson, James Hardy (1965). The Algebraic Eigenvalue Problem (1 ed.). Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press. ISBN 0198534183. Retrieved 2016-02-11. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help) (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. 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.
2. Wilkinson, J. H. (1961). "Error Analysis of Direct Methods of Matrix Inversion". Journal of the ACM. 8 (3): 281–330. doi:10.1145/321075.321076. hdl:10338.dmlcz/103862. S2CID 13076225.
3. O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "James H. Wilkinson", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
4. 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 (eds.). A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century. Academic Press. ISBN 0124916503.

Other websites

• Photo of Wilkinson from Nicholas Higham's archive
• ADVANCES IN NUMERICAL LINEAR ALGEBRA: CELEBRATING THE CENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF JAMES H. WILKINSON, MAY 29-30, 2019 Archived 2020-08-02 at the Wayback Machine