Wallace Givens

James Wallace Givens, Jr. (born December 14, 1910 in Alberene near Charlottesville , † March 5, 1993 ) was a mathematician and pioneer of computer science . The Givens rotation is named after him.

He received his bachelor's degree from Lynchburg College in 1928 at the age of 17 and his master's degree from the University of Virginia under Ben Zion Linfield in 1931 (after a one-year scholarship at the University of Kentucky ). He was assistant to Oswald Veblen at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University , where he received his doctorate in 1936 with the dissertation Tensor Coordinates of Linear Spaces .

Givens taught at Cornell University , University of Tennessee , Wayne State University and Northwestern University and worked early with UNIVAC I at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University and later with Oracle computers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory . In 1963 he became a scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago , where he was the new (1964-1970) director of the Department of Applied Mathematics. From 1968 to 1970 he was the fourteenth president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). In 1974 he received the Humboldt Research Award . In 1979 he retired from Northwestern University.

Fonts

• Numerical computation of the characteristic values ​​of a real symmetric matrix . Carbide & Carbon Chemicals Comp., Oak Ridge 1954.
• Computation of plane unitary rotations transforming a general matrix to triangular form , J. SIAM, Volume 6, 1958, pp. 26-50.

literature

• James CT Pool: James Wallace Givens, Jr. (1910-1993) . Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 41, Issue 1, pp. 29-30, 1994.