David M. Young

Founder of the Center for Numerical Analysis at The University of Texas at Austin, Young was also known for establishing the Successive Overrelaxation (SOR) method.

Professor Young's career and many contributions almost exactly paralleled the first fifty years of the field of modern scientific computing. When Young came to The University of Texas at Austin in 1958, he established the Computation Center and served as its director until 1970, when he founded the Center for Numerical Analysis and served as its director until 1999. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1950 from Harvard University working under the direction of the late Professor Garrett Birkhoff, and this work established the SOR method.

His research activity focused on the numerical solution of partial differential equations based on the use of finite difference methods and on the use of iterative methods to solve associated systems of linear algebraic equations involving matrices which are very large and sparse. Several computer software packages were developed based on this research as part of the ITPACK project. The research was extended to include methods suitable for shared memory and distributed memory parallel computers. More rapidly convergent iterative methods based on the use of parallel multilevel procedures and parallel alternating-type methods were also developed.