Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen , nicknamed Nick, (born August 30, 1955 in Boston ) is an American mathematician who studies numerical mathematics .

life and work

Trefethen grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts and attended the Phillips Exeter Academy. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard College ( summa cum laude ) in 1977 and his master's degree from Stanford University in 1980 , where he received his doctorate in computer science in 1982. In 1982 he was Adjunct Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University and from 1984 Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . In 1991 he became Professor at Cornell University and since 1997 he has been Professor of Numerical Analysis at Oxford University , where he is a Fellow of Balliol College. He is also a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.

In 1998/99 he was Rouse Ball Lecturer at Cambridge University.

Trefethen deals with numerical analysis and numerical linear algebra , for example in spectral methods for differential equations, non-normal eigenvalue problems, conformal mapping, hydrodynamics and approximation theory. He introduced pseudospectra to the study of non-normal matrices and operators and developed the project of the software package (open source) Chebfun, based on MATLAB , which extends known algorithms from numbers to continuous functions.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the American Mathematical Society , a member of the National Academy of Engineering and, since 2019, the Academia Europaea . In 2013 he received the Naylor Prize and in 1985 the Fox Prize of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) and its gold medal. He was a Presidential Young Investigator and was President of SIAM in 2011/12 .

Trefethen has received teaching awards from MIT, Cornell and Oxford. Among other things, he initiated the SIAM 100 Dollar-100 Digit Challenge . You should solve 10 numerical problems and you could get a maximum of 100 points for 10 decimal places in each of the problems. The problems were published in the January / February 2002 SIAM News, Science, and other journals and received a great response (20 out of 94 teams received first prizes for 100 points).

Trefethen received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. He was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians 1998 in Berlin ( Schwartz-Christoffel Mapping in the Computer Era , with Tobin Driscoll) and at the International Congress in Applied Mathematics (ICAM) in Hamburg in 1995. For 2017 he was awarded the George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition , and in 2020 he will hold the John von Neumann Lecture .

He is married and has two children.

Fonts

  • with David Bau III: Numerical Linear Algebra, SIAM 1997
  • Spectral Methods in MATLAB, SIAM 2000
  • with Tobin Driscoll: Schwarz-Christoffel Mapping, Cambridge University Press 2002
  • with Mark Embree: Spectra and Pseudospectra: The Behavior of Nonnormal Matrices and Operators, Princeton University Press 2005
  • Trefethen's Index Cards, World Scientific 2011
  • Approximation Theory and Approximation Practice, SIAM 2013
  • Numerical Analysis, in Timothy Gowers u. a. Princeton Companion to Mathematics , Princeton University Press 2008, pp. 290-302, online

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Career data based on American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. Chebfun ( Memento of the original from May 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www2.maths.ox.ac.uk
  3. Folkmar Bornemann, Dirk Laurie, Stan Wagon, Jörg Waldvogel, The SIAM 100 Digit Challenge , SIAM 1987, Springer Verlag 2006, related website
  4. SIAM 100 Dollar- 100 Digit Challenge