• 1939 August 17
    (b.) - ?

Bio/Description

An American mathematician and computer programmer, he specializes in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, FORTRAN scientific subroutine libraries for numerical computing. He invented MATLAB, a numerical computing package, to give his students at the University of New Mexico easy access to these libraries without writing FORTRAN. In 1984, he co-founded MathWorks in Portola Valley, California with Jack Little to commercialize this program. He served as the company?s Chief Scientist. He was born into a family of journalists, and grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. He developed an early interest in science and mathematics, pursuing technical hobbies such as ham radio. In 1961 he received his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. He received his M.S. degree in 1963 and earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1965 both from Stanford University in Stanford, California. He was a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science for almost 20 years at the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the University of New Mexico. Before joining MathWorks full-time in 1989, he also worked for Intel Hypercube and Ardent Computer Corporation. He is also co-author of four textbooks on numerical methods and is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 2007-2008. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering on February 14, 1997. He received an honorary degree from Link?ping University, Sweden. He received an honorary degree of Doctor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo on June 16, 2001, and on April 30, 2004, he was appointed Honorary Doctor (doctor technices, honoris causa) at the Technical University of Denmark. In April 2012, the IEEE Computer Society named him the recipient of the 2012 Computer Pioneer Award. In February 2014, IEEE named him the recipient of the 2014 IEEE John von Neumann Medal. He is the co-author of several books or publications including, but not limited to: "Computer methods for mathematical computations" with George E. Forsythe and Michael A. Malcolm, Prentice-Hall Series in Automatic Computation, Prentice-Hall., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1977, MR 0458783 ISBN 0-13-165332-6; and the author of two online books, "Numerical Computing with MATLAB", Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 2004, ISBN 978-0-89871-560-6.; and Experiments with MATLAB, www.mathworks.com, 2009, ISBN-10, ISBN-13. He currently works remotely from his home office in Santa Fe, New Mexico, writing books, articles, and MATLAB programs.
  • Date of Birth:

    1939 August 17
  • Noted For:

    Co-author of LINPACK and EISPACK, FORTRAN libraries for numerical computing, he invented MATLAB, a numerical computing package, giving easy access to these libraries without writing FORTRAN
  • Category of Achievement:

  • More Info: