Magnus Hestenes

Magnus Hestenes (* 1906 in Bricelyn, Minnesota; † 31 May 1991) was an American mathematician. In 1952, he led with Eduard Stiefel CG method (method of conjugate gradients) in the numerical linear algebra a.

Life

Hestenes studied at the University of Wisconsin ( Master's degree 1928) and in 1932 with Gilbert Bliss at the University of Chicago doctorate ( Sufficient Conditions for the general problem of Mayer with variable end-points ). He was then at Harvard University in Marston Morse. During World War II he worked as a member of the Group for Applied Mathematics from Cornell University with air defense. After the war he was briefly an associate professor at the University of Chicago and in 1947 professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA ), where he retired in 1973. From 1950 to 1958 he was chairman of the mathematics department there, and from 1961 to 1963 he was head of the computer center of the university. He had 34 doctoral students in Chicago and Los Angeles. In the 1950s, he was also part-time at the Institute of Numerical Analysis (INA ) of the National Bureau of Standards at UCLA, where it came to his release with boots on the method of conjugate gradients, both had independently developed the procedure before their meeting.

In the 1960s and 1970s, he was an advisor to the Institute for Defense Analyses and the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Hestenes was Guggenheim Fellow (1954) and Fulbright Scholar. In 1954 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Amsterdam. At times, he was vice president of the American Mathematical Society.

His doctoral include Richard Tapia and Glen Culler.

He is the father of David Hestenes.

Work

In addition to the development of the method of conjugate gradients ( via similar methods in geometry, he worked as early as the 1930s ), he worked on the problem of Bolza in the calculus of variations and optimal control theory ( starting from a problem of air defense ) and quadratic forms in Hilbert spaces (1951 ). A, issued in 1950 at the Rand Corporation work contained a version of the maximum principle of Pontryagin Lew ( from the mid-1950s ).

Writings

  • Optimization theory -the finite dimensional case, Wiley 1975
  • Calculus of variations and optimal control theory, Wiley 1966
  • Conjugate direction methods in optimization, Springer 1980

Source

  • Obituary in Journal of Optimization Theory and applications, Bd.73, 1992, p.225
  • Hestenes Conjugacy and gradients, memories of Hestenes, in Stephen G. Nash (Editor) A history of scientific computing, ACM Press, 1990, p.167 -179, online, pdf
May 31 Conjugate gradient method University of Wisconsin System National Institute of Standards and Technology Gene H. Golub Integrated Authority File
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