Numerical analysts played a leading role in creating the field of computer science in the 1960s. There were Gautschi and Rice at Purdue, Forsythe and Golub at Stanford, Bauer in Munich, Stiefel and Rutishauser in Zurich, Bennett in Sydney, Fox at Oxford, Gear at Illinois, Dahlquist in Stockholm,….

Half a century on, there have been 70 winners of the Turing Award, computer science’s highest honor. How many have been numerical analysts? The answer is three, if you include Richard Hamming (1968). Wilkinson (1970) and Kahan (1989) were the other two, 30+ years ago.

[4 June 2019]