Herbert Keller (mathematician)

Herbert Bishop Keller (born June 19, 1925 in Paterson , New Jersey , † January 26, 2008 in Pasadena ) was an American mathematician who dealt with numerical analysis and applied mathematics.

Life

Keller studied physics engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology and then went to the US Navy, where he was an artillery officer in the North Atlantic during World War II and then at a Navy school, where he taught Jimmy Carter , among other things . He then continued his studies at Georgia Tech and New York University , where he received his doctorate in 1954 with Wilhelm Magnus (but in reality with his brother Joseph B. Keller , with whom he also published) ( On Systems of Linear Ordinary Differential Equations with Applications to Ionospheric Propagation ). From 1951 to 1953 he also taught mathematics at Sarah Lawrence College. He then stayed at the Courant Institute at New York University, where he became Vice Director of the Computing and Applied Mathematics Center of the Atomic Energy Commission . In 1965 he was a visiting scientist at Caltech , where he became Professor of Applied Mathematics from 1967. From 1989 he was director of the Center for Parallel Computing there. In 2000 he was retired. He then was a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Computational Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego .

Keller dealt with the numerical analysis of nonlinear phenomena such as bifurcation theory , which he investigated with homotopy techniques in parameter space and with path following methods, with numerical hydrodynamics , two-point boundary value problems and parallel algorithms .

From 1973 to 1974 Keller was Vice President and from 1975 to 1976 President of SIAM , whose Theodore von Karman Prize he received in 1994. From 1979 to 1980 he was a Guggenheim Fellow . He had been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1976 . Keller was co-editor of the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, Numerical Mathematics, and the Journal of Computer and System Sciences.

Keller was a passionate cyclist and died in a swimming accident after one of his regular 40-mile bike rides in the morning. His older brother Joseph B. Keller was also a well-known mathematician.

Fonts

• with Eugene Isaacson: Analysis of Numerical Methods, Wiley 1966, Dover 1994
• Numerical methods for two-point boundary-value problems, Waltham (Massachusetts), Blaisdell 1968, Dover 1992
• Editor: Computational Fluid Dynamics, American Mathematical Society 1978
• Lectures on Numerical Methods in Bifurcation Problems, Springer 1987 (Lectures Tata Institute / Indian Institute of Technology)

Web links

• Obituary at the SIAM
• Oral History Interview, pdf