William Kahan

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William Kahan

William "Velvel" Morton Kahan (born June 5, 1933 in Toronto , Ontario ) is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist . His main field of work is numerical mathematics .

Kahan studied at the University of Toronto , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1954 and his master's degree in mathematics in 1956 . He did his doctorate there in 1958 under Byron Griffith (Gauss-Seidel methods of solving large systems of linear equations). Since 1969 he has been Professor of Mathematics, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley , meanwhile retired.

Kahan advised Intel in the design of the 8087 - floating point unit . Building on this experience, he is the main architect of the IEEE 754 standard for binary floating point numbers and its generalization IEEE 854 and was also involved in the IEEE 754r revision . He developed the Kahan summation algorithm, an important algorithm for minimizing the error in summing a sequence of floating point numbers with finite precision. With Gene H. Golub he developed a stable direct algorithm for calculating a singular value decomposition of a matrix. In addition, he designed the numerical algorithms for the pocket calculators of the HP-10C series for Hewlett-Packard .

In 1989 he was awarded the Turing Prize , in 2000 the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award and in 1997 he was John von Neumann Lecturer . He became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1994, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering in 2005 . In 1993 he received an honorary doctorate from Chalmers University of Technology and in 1998 from the University of Waterloo .

James Demmel is one of his PhD students .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. William Kahan in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. Golub, Kahan Calculating the singular values ​​and pseudo-inverse of a matrix, J. Soc. Indust. Appl. Math. Ser. B Num. Anal., Vol. 2, 1965, pp. 205-224