Alston Scott Householder
Alston Scott Householder (born May 5, 1904 in Rockford, Illinois ; † July 4, 1993 , Malibu (California) ) was an American mathematician who pioneered numerical linear algebra .
In 1958 he introduced the household transformation, named after him, as a means of numerically solving systems of linear equations . Householder contributed a lot to the systematic order of the then chaotic and confusing field of numerics, especially numerical linear algebra. He also propagated the systematic use of norms in linear algebra.
Life
Householder spent his youth in Alabama , earning a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University of Evanston, Illinois in 1925 and a master's degree from Cornell University , New York in 1927 . He taught mathematics at the University of Chicago while preparing his doctorate on the calculus of variations . After receiving his PhD in 1937, he focused on mathematical biology. This area was influenced by his work with Nicolas Rashevsky at the University of Chicago.
In 1946 he went to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory , Tennessee as a mathematician , where he received a chair in 1948 . During this time his interest shifted to numerical mathematics . In 1969 he left Oak Ridge and became a professor at the University of Tennessee , where he also became dean. In 1974 he retired and moved to Malibu, California.
Alston Householder was married twice and had two children.
Householder contributed to research in a variety of ways in the organizations of which he was a member. He was President of the American Mathematical Society , President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Association for Computing Machinery . He was on the editorial board of Psychometrika , Numerical Mathematics and Linear Algebra and Its Applications , as well as editor of SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis . He also organized the Gatlinburg Conferences on Numerical Mathematics, which are still held today under the name Householder Symposia .
In 1969 Householder was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
Works
- The theory of matrices in numerical analysis , 1964
Web links
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Alston Scott Householder. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
- Literature by and about Alston Scott Householder in the WorldCat bibliographic database
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Householder, Alston Scott |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 5, 1904 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rockford, Illinois , USA |
| DATE OF DEATH | 4th July 1993 |
| Place of death | Malibu (California) , USA |