John Todd (computer scientist)

John Todd ( born May 16, 1911 in Carnacally, County Down, Northern Ireland today, † June 22 2007 in Pasadena ) was an Irish mathematician who worked on numerical mathematics and computer science.

Life

Todd was one of five children of a teacher - married couple. He went to school in Belfast and studied from 1928 at the Queen's University of Belfast, where in 1931 he earned his undergraduate degree. He studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he spent two years research student of John Edensor Littlewood. After that, he was at Queen's University in Belfast again, but followed the local Professor John Greenless Semple, as this 1936 went to the King's College London. In the same year he attended the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Oslo and in Poland Kazimierz Kuratowski, Waclaw Sierpinski and Stanislaw Saks.

In 1937 he married the mathematician Olga Taussky - Todd, whom he had consulted because of a group-theoretical problem. Both worked together frequently in the subsequent period, for example, in several written during the bombing of London in World War II publications on matrix theory. While work on military research for the British Navy ( demagnetization of ships against magnetic mines ), he initiated the construction of a data center for the Admiralty and then for the National Physics Laboratory, where he worked with Arthur Erdélyi. In 1945 he visited Germany in a military mission, in which he examined the calculating machines of Konrad Zuse and the Mathematical Research Institute Oberwolfach protected with its library of looting and occupation by French occupation troops. He had been known as the "savior of Oberwolfach ", and the Research Institute honored him with a scholarship named after him.

In 1947 he moved with his wife Olga in the United States, where he led the Institute for Advanced Study, visited at the John von Neumann led his own computer center in 1948 moved to Los Angeles and finally in 1949 to the newly established laboratory of Applied Mathematics of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC. Starting in 1954, he had been head of the Department of numerical Analysis and developed in collaboration with his wife, who was a consultant there, numerical algorithms for scientific computing, in which he pioneered with his group. In 1957 he moved with Olga Taussky - Todd ( the professor was there until 1971 ) as a professor at the California Institute of Technology, where he taught mathematics and numerical scientific computing. 2001, a conference took place on his 90th birthday at Caltech.

He should not be confused with the British surveyor John Arthur Todd.

Writings

• Introduction to the constructive theory of functions, Academic Press, 1963.
• Basic Numerical Mathematics, 2 volumes, Birkhäuser 1977, 1979