Citizenship British Role Professor of mathematics Name Nicholas Higham | Doctoral advisor George Hall Nationality British Residence United Kingdom | |
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Born Nicholas John Higham
25 December 1961 (age 62)
Salford ( 1961-12-25 ) Institutions University of Manchester
Cornell University Alma mater University of Manchester Thesis Nearness Problems in Numerical Linear Algebra (1985) Education Victoria University of Manchester Fields Mathematics, Numerical analysis, Numerical linear algebra, Mathematical software Books MATLAB Guide, Accuracy and stability of, Handbook of Writing for the Ma, Functions of matrices, King Arthur: Myth‑Mak | ||
Nicholas Higham
Nicholas John Higham FRS (born 25 December 1961 in Salford) is a British numerical analyst and Richardson Professor of Applied Mathematics at the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester.
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Education
Higham was educated at the University of Manchester, gaining his Bachelor of Science degree in 1982, Master of Science degree in 1983 and PhD 1985. His PhD thesis was supervised by George Hall.
Research
Higham is Director of Research within the School of Mathematics, Director of the Manchester Institute for Mathematical Sciences (MIMS), and Head of the Numerical Analysis Group. He held a prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2003–2008) and as of 2006 is on the Institute for Scientific Information Highly Cited Researcher list.
Higham is best known for his work on the accuracy and stability of numerical algorithms. He has more than 85 refereed publications on topics such as rounding error analysis, linear systems, least squares problems, matrix functions and nonlinear matrix equations, condition number estimation, and generalised eigenvalue problems. He has contributed software to LAPACK and the NAG library, and has contributed code included in the MATLAB distribution.
Higham is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Forum of Mathematics, Foundations of Computational Mathematics, IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, Linear Algebra and its Applications, Numerical Algorithms, and SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications.
Higham's books include Functions of Matrices: Theory and Computation (2008), Accuracy and Stability of Numerical Algorithms, Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences, and MATLAB Guide, co-authored with his brother Desmond Higham.
Awards and honours
His honours include the Alston S. Householder Award VI, 1987 (for the best PhD thesis in numerical algebra 1984—1987), the 1988 Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis, a 1999 Junior Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society. He was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007. In 2008 he was awarded the Fröhlich Prize in recognition of 'his leading contributions to numerical linear algebra and numerical stability analysis'.