Richard P. Brent

Richard Peirce Brent ( born April 20, 1946 in Melbourne) is an Australian mathematician ( Computational Mathematics ) and computer scientists.

Life

Brent studied at Monash University ( Bachelor in Mathematics 1968) and Stanford University (Master 's degree in 1970 in computer science ), where, in 1971 with George Forsythe ( 1917-1972 ) and Gene Golub in numerical mathematics doctorate ( Algorithms for finding zeros and extrema of functions without calculating derivatives ). He also acquired, in 1998 a master's degree at Oxford University in 1981 and a doctorate ( D.Sc. ) at Monash University in computer science. As a post-doc, he was 1971/72 at IBM in Yorktown Heights. 1972-1976 he was a researcher at the Computer Center of the Australian National University (ANU ), where he was from 1978 professor of computer science and from 1985, the Computer Science Lab headed. 1998 to 2005 he was professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Hugh 's College. Since 2005 he has been the Australian Research Council (ARC ) Fellow at the ANU at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems. He has been a visiting professor in the 1970s at Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1997 at Harvard.

In 1963 he was awarded the Australian BHP Prize. Since 1982 he is a member of the Australian Academy of Science, the Hannan Medal he received in 2005. In 1984, he received the Medal of the Australian Mathematical Society. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM ).

Work

Brent deals with complexity theory, Algorithmic number theory, analysis of algorithms, neural networks, random algorithms, high precision arithmetic, random number generators, parallel and distributed computing and cryptography.

For example, he worked on the calculation of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function (and showed that the first 75 million zeros lie on the critical line ) and factorized with John M. Pollard, the eighth Fermat and 1999, the tenth and the eleventh in 1988 (both with Hendrik Lenstras elliptic curves factorization ). One of his 1973 published algorithm (Brent ) method for the numerical determination of zeros of functions is named after him. In 1975, he was regardless of Eugene Salamin the Brent - Salamin algorithm for the determination of Pi ( by a process that goes back to Carl Friedrich Gauss and Legendre and the arithmetic- geometric mean is used), and also showed that the elementary functions ( such as sine, cosine, logarithm ) can be evaluated with high accuracy with the same complexity as pi. His collection of Fortran routines MP (1978 ) for numerical calculations and for the evaluation of the elementary functions with selectable high accuracy was used a lot because it was freely available and very efficient with increasing number of digits. In 1980, he was with Edwin McMillan a new algorithm for determining the Euler - Mascheroni constant with the aid of Bessel functions.

Most recently, he worked with Paul Zimmermann on a book on modern computer arithmetic, whose preliminary version can be accessed online.

Writings

  • Algorithms for minimization without derivatives, Prentice- Hall 1973, ISBN 0-13-022335-2; Dover Publications 2002 ISBN 0-486-41998-3.
  • Paul Zimmermann: Modern computer arithmetic. ( Cambridge Monographs on Applied and Computational Mathematics, no. 18) Cambridge University Press 2010, ISBN 0-521-19469-5.
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