James Weldon Demmel Jr. (born October 19, 1955) is an American mathematician and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

, the ''Dr. Richard Carl Dehmel Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science'' at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1999, Demmel was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to numerical linear algebra and scientific computing.

Biography

Born in Pittsburgh, Demmel did his undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology, graduating in 1975 with a B.S. in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science in 1983 from UC Berkeley, under the supervision of

William Kahan William "Velvel" Morton Kahan (born June 5, 1933) is a Canadian mathematician and computer scientist, who received the Turing Award in 1989 for "''his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis''", was named an ACM Fellow in 1994, and inducte ...

; his dissertation was entitled ''A Numerical Analyst's Jordan Canonical Form''. After holding a faculty position at New York University for six years, he moved to Berkeley in 1990.

Academic Works

Demmel is known for his work on LAPACK, a software library for numerical linear algebra and more generally for research in numerical algorithms combining mathematical rigor with high performance implementation. Prometheus, a parallel multigrid finite element solver written by Demmel, Mark Adams, and Robert Taylor, won the Carl Benz Award at Supercomputing 1999 and the Gordon Bell Prize for Adams and his coworkers at Supercomputing 2004.

Honors and awards

Demmel was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1999,NAE Elects New Members
, SIAM, May 22, 1999. a fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

in 1999, a fellow of the IEEE in 2001, a fellow of SIAM in 2009, and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2011. Demmel was one of two scientists honored in 1986 with the

Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis The Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) is a biennial prize established in 1985 by the IMA in honour of mathematician Leslie Fox (1918-1992). The prize honours "young numerical analyst ...

. In 1993, Demmel won the J.H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, and in 2010, he was the winner of the IEEE's Sidney Fernbach Award "for computational science leadership in creating adaptive, innovative, high-performance linear algebra software".UC Berkeley Professor James Demmel Receives 2010 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award
, HPCwire, September 30, 2010.James W. Demmel, 2010 Sidney Fernbach Award Recipient
, IEEE Computer Society, retrieved 2011-05-04. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He received the

IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award In 1989, the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium established the Charles Babbage Award to be given each year to a conference participant in recognition of exceptional contributions to the field. In almost all cases, the awa ...

in 2013.

Personal life

Demmel is married to

Katherine Yelick Katherine "Kathy" Anne Yelick is an American computer scientist, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berk ...

, who is also an ACM Fellow and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, and Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences at

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), commonly referred to as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States Department of Energy National Labs, United States national laboratory that is owned by, and conducts scientific research on behalf of, t ...

References

External links

Home page at UC Berkeley
{{DEFAULTSORT:Demmel, James W. Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American computer scientists Numerical analysts California Institute of Technology alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni New York University faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellow Members of the IEEE Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty 1955 births People from Pittsburgh