William Kahan

William " Velvel " Morton Kahan ( born June 5, 1933, Toronto, Ontario ) is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist. His main area of ​​work is the numerical mathematics.

Kahan studied at the University of Toronto where he received a Bachelor in 1954 and 1956 Master's degree in mathematics. He received his PhD in 1958 at Byron Griffith ( Gauss -Seidel methods of solving large systems of linear equations ). Since 1969 he is professor of mathematics, computer science and electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, now emeritus.

Kahan consulted in the design of the Intel 8087 floating point unit. Based on this experience, he is the chief architect of the IEEE 754 binary floating-point numbers and its generalization IEEE 854, and was also involved in the revision of IEEE 754r. He developed the summation algorithm of Kahan, an important algorithm for minimizing the error in the summation of a series of floating point numbers with finite precision. With Gene H. Golub, he developed a stable direct algorithm for computing a singular value decomposition of a matrix. In addition, he designed for Hewlett-Packard, the numerical algorithms for the calculator, the HP -10C series.

The Turing Prize he was awarded in 1989, 2000 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award and in 1997 he was John von Neumann Lecturer. In 1994 he became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM ), 2003 Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2005 Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering. In 1993 he received an honorary doctorate from Chalmers University of Technology, 1998 the University of Waterloo.

His doctoral James Demmel heard.