Herbert Keller

Herbert Bishop Keller ( born June 19, 1925 in Paterson (New Jersey); † January 26, 2008 in Pasadena ) was an American mathematician who worked on Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics.

Life and work

Keller studied at the Georgia Institute of Technology physics engineer and then joined the U.S. Navy where he served as an artillery officer in the North Atlantic during the Second World War and thereafter on a Navy school where he taught, among others, Jimmy Carter. He then continued his studies at Georgia Tech and the New York University, where he in 1954 with Wilhelm Magnus (in reality, but with his brother Joseph B. Keller, with whom he already published ) received his doctorate (On Systems of Linear Ordinary Differential Equations with Applications to Ionospheric propagation). 1951 to 1953 he also taught at Sarah Lawrence College Mathematics. He then remained at the Courant Institute of New York University, where he was deputy director of the Computing and Applied Mathematics Center, the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1965 he was a visiting scientist at Caltech, where he was from 1967 Professor of Applied Mathematics. From 1989 he was the Director of The Center for Parallel Computing. In 2000 he became Professor Emeritus. After that, he was a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Computational Mathematics, University of California, San Diego.

Keller dealt with the numerical analysis of nonlinear phenomena such as Bifurkationsstheorie, he examined with homotopy techniques in parameter space and with Wegverfolgungsmethoden (path Following methods ), with numerical hydrodynamics, two-point boundary value problems and parallel algorithms.

1973-1974 Keller was Vice President and 1975-1976 President of SIAM, the Theodore von Karman Prize he received in 1994. 1979 to 1980 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Keller was associate editor of the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis of of 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 is also a well-known mathematician.

Writings

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