Lloyd N. Trefethen
Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen, called Nick, ( born August 30, 1955 in Boston) is an American mathematician who deals with numerical analysis.
Life and work
Trefethen grew up in Lexington ( Massachusetts), and attended Phillips Exeter Academy. He received his bachelor's degree in 1977 from Harvard College ( summa cum laude ) in 1980 and his master's degree at Stanford University, where he received his doctorate in 1982 in computer science. In 1982 he was adjunct assistant professor in computer science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University and from 1984 Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1991 he became a professor at Cornell University and he has been since 1997 Professor of Numerical Analysis at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Balliol College. He is also a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.
1998/99 he was Rouse Ball Lecturer at the University of Cambridge.
It deals with numerical analysis and numerical linear algebra, for example, spectral methods for differential equations, non- regular eigenvalue problems, conformal mappings, hydrodynamics and approximation theory. He led a pseudo- spectra in the study of non- normal matrices and operators. He developed the project of the software package (open source) Chebfun based on MATLAB, extends the known algorithms of numbers on continuous functions.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the American Mathematical Society and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2013 he was awarded the Naylor Prize and in 1985 the Fox Prize of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA ) and the gold medal. He was a Presidential Young Investigator and 2011/12 was President of SIAM.
He received awards for teaching at MIT, Cornell and Oxford. Among other things, he initiated the SIAM 100 dollar 100 Digit Challenge. One should solve numerical problems 10 and could receive a maximum of 100 points for each 10 decimal places in each of the problems. The problems were published in the SIAM News January / February 2002 in Science and other journals and found great response (20 out of 94 teams received first prizes for 100 points).
Trefethen received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. He was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin in 1998 ( Schwartz - Christoffel mapping in the computer era, with Tobin Driscoll ) and at the International Congress in Applied Mathematics (ICAM ) in Hamburg in 1995.
He is married and has two children.
Writings
- David Bau III: Numerical Linear Algebra, SIAM 1997
- Spectral Methods in MATLAB, SIAM 2000
- With Tobin Driscoll: Black- Christoffel mapping, Cambridge University Press 2002
- With Mark Embree: Spectra and Pseudo Spectra: The Behavior of nonnormal matrices and operators, Princeton University Press 2005
- Trefethen 's Index Cards, World Scientific 2011
- Approximation Theory and Approximation Practice, SIAM 2013
- Inter alia, Numerical Analysis, in Timothy Gowers Princeton Companion to Mathematics, Princeton University Press, 2008, pp. 290-302, online