Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen (born 30 August 1955) is an American mathematician, professor of numerical analysis and head of the Numerical Analysis Group at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.

Education

Trefethen was born 30 August 1955 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of mechanical engineer Lloyd M. Trefethen and codebreaker, poet, teacher and editor

Florence Newman Trefethen Florence Marion Newman Trefethen (1921–2012) was an American codebreaker, historian of operations research, poet, and English professor. Early life and education Florence Marion Newman was born in 1921, in Philadelphia. She graduated '' magna c ...

. He obtained his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1977 and his master's from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1980. His PhD was on ''Wave Propagation and Stability for Finite Difference Schemes'' supervised by Joseph E. Oliger at

Career and research

Following his PhD, Trefethen went on to work at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cornell University, before being appointed to a chair at the University of Oxford and a Fellowship of

Balliol College, Oxford Balliol College () is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. One of Oxford's oldest colleges, it was founded around 1263 by John I de Balliol, a landowner from Barnard Castle in County Durham, who provided the f ...

. , he has published around 150 journal papers spanning a wide range of areas within numerical analysis and applied mathematics, including non-normal eigenvalue problems and applications, spectral methods for differential equations, numerical linear algebra, fluid mechanics, computational

complex analysis Complex analysis, traditionally known as the theory of functions of a complex variable, is the branch of mathematical analysis that investigates Function (mathematics), functions of complex numbers. It is helpful in many branches of mathemati ...

, and approximation theory. He is perhaps best known for his work on pseudospectra of non-normal matrices and operators. This work covers theoretical aspects as well as numerical algorithms, and applications including fluid mechanics, numerical solution of partial differential equations, numerical linear algebra, shuffling of cards, random matrices, differential equations and lasers. Trefethen is currently an

ISI highly cited researcher The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysis, ...

. Trefethen has written a number of books on numerical analysis including ''Numerical Linear Algebra'' with David Bau, ''Spectral Methods in MATLAB'', ''Schwarz–Christoffel Mapping'' with Tobin Driscoll, and ''Spectra and Pseudospectra: The Behavior of Nonnormal Matrices and Operators'' with

Mark Embree Mark Embree is professor of computational and applied mathematicsbr>at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Until 2013, he was a professor of computational and applied mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Mark Embree was awarded ...

. He is the leader of the MATLAB-based Chebfun software project. In 2013 he proposed a new formula to calculate the BMI of a person: :

\text = 1.3 \times \frac

(

International System of Units The International System of Units, known by the international abbreviation SI in all languages and sometimes pleonastically as the SI system, is the modern form of the metric system and the world's most widely used system of measurement. E ...

)

Books

* ''Numerical Linear Algebra'' (SIAM, 1997) with David Bau * ''Spectral Methods in Matlab'' (SIAM, 2000) * ''Schwarz-Christoffel Mapping'' (Cambridge, 2002) with T. A. Driscoll * ''Spectra and Pseudospectra: The Behavior of Nonnormal Matrices and Operators'' (Princeton, 2005) with Mark Embree * ''Trefethen's Index Cards'' (World Scientific 2011) * ''Approximation Theory and Approximation Practice'' (SIAM, 2013 and 2020) * ''Exploring ODEs'' (SIAM, 2018) with Á. Birkisson and T. A. Driscoll * ''An Applied Mathematician’s Apology'' (SIAM, 2022)

Awards and honours

Trefethen was the first winner of 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 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

in Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States. Trefethen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2005, and his certificate of election reads: In 2010 Trefethen was awarded the

Gold Medal A gold medal is a medal awarded for highest achievement in a non-military field. Its name derives from the use of at least a fraction of gold in form of plating or alloying in its manufacture. Since the eighteenth century, gold medals have bee ...

of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in recognition of his "outstanding contributions to mathematics and its applications over a period of years". In 2013 Trefethen was awarded the Naylor Prize and lectureship in Applied Mathematics from the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical S ...

. He was awarded the George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 2017 and the John von Neumann Prize in 2020 by SIAM.

Personal life

Trefethen has one son and one daughter from his first marriage to Anne Elizabeth Trefethen (née Daman). He is currently married to Kate McLoughlin, a professor of English Literature at Oxford.

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Trefethen, Lloyd Nicholas Fellows of the Royal Society Numerical analysts 20th-century British mathematicians 21st-century British mathematicians Living people Harvard University alumni Stanford University alumni 1955 births Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Presidents of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences faculty Nick