Professor James Weldon Demmel

An American mathematician and computer scientist, he is the Dr. Richard Carl Dehmel Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. He also has a joint appointment with the Future Technologies Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He did his undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology, graduating in 1975 with a B.S. degree in Mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1983 from the University of California (UC), Berkeley, under the supervision of William Kahan; 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. He 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. Numerical linear algebra is the study of algorithms for performing linear algebra computations, most notably matrix operations, on computers. It is often a fundamental part of engineering and computational science problems, such as image and signal processing, telecommunication, computational finance, materials science simulations, structural biology, data mining, bioinformatics, fluid dynamics, and many other areas. Such software relies heavily on the development, analysis, and implementation of state-of-the-art algorithms for solving various numerical linear algebra problems, in large part because of the role of matrices in finite difference and finite element methods. He is also known for his work on ScaLAPACK which form the standard mathematical libraries for AMD, Apple (under Mac OS X), Cray, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, IMSL/Rogue Wave, Intel, Interactive Supercomputing, several Linux distributions (including Debian), Mathworks (MATLAB), NAG, NEC, PGI, and SGI. These libraries form part of the standard mathematical libraries for many vendors, including AMD, Apple (under Mac OS X), Cray, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, IMSL/Rogue Wave, Intel, InteractiveSupercomputing, Mathworks (producers of Matlab), NAG, NEC, PGI and SGI. Prometheus, a parallel multigrid finite element solver which he wrote with 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. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1999, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery 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. He was one of two scientists honored in 1986 with the Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis. In 1993, he 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". In 2012 he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He is married to Katherine Yelick, who is herself a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.