Alston Scott Householder

Alston Scott Householder ( born May 5, 1904 in Rockford (Illinois ); † 4 July 1993 Malibu ( California)) was an American mathematician who has pioneered in numerical linear algebra.

He led in 1958 named after him Householder transformation as a means of numerical solution of linear systems of equations a. Householder contributed much to the systematic order of the then chaotic and confusing area of numerical analysis, in particular numerical linear algebra, at. He also advocated the systematic use of standards in linear algebra.

Life

Householder spent his youth in Alabama, where he received a Bachelor's degree in 1925 from Northwestern University of Evanston, Illinois, and in 1927 a master's degree from Cornell University. At the University of Chicago, he taught mathematics while he was preparing his doctoral thesis on the calculus of variations. After 1937 he was awarded his doctorate, he focused on mathematical biology. This area has been influenced by his work with Nicolas Rashevsky at the University of Chicago.

In 1946 he went as a mathematician at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he became a professor in 1948. During this time, his interests shifted towards numerical mathematics. In 1969 he left Oak Ridge and was a professor at the University of Tennessee, where he was also dean. In 1974 he retired and moved to Malibu, California.

Alston Householder was married twice and had two children.

In the organizations whose member he was wearing householder with in many different ways to research. He was president of the American Mathematical Society, President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Association for Computing Machinery. He was on the editorial board at Psychometrika, Numerical Mathematics and Linear Algebra and Its Applications, as well as editor of SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis. He also organized the Gatlinburg Conferences on Numerical Mathematics, which today still take place under the name Householder Symposia.

Works

• The theory of matrices in numerical analysis, 1964