The IMA Summer Lecture took place at the Royal Society on 29 June 2011. The audience comprised Institute members and invited guests from government, industry, education and other professional and learned associations.
At the event Mike Walker, on behalf of the IMA, presented Professor Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen FRS with the IMA Gold Medal. Professor Trefethen is Professor of Numerical Analysis and Head of the Numerical Analysis Group in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford.
Mike Walker then handed over to Professor Trefethen for his lecture, Six Myths of Polynomial Interpolation and Quadrature (Mathematics Today August 2011).
Nick Trefethen (as he is known) gained his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1977 and his master’s degree from Stanford in 1980. His PhD thesis at Stanford in 1982, supervised by Joseph Oliger, was entitled Wave Propagation and Stability for Finite Difference Schemes. He went on to work at the Courant Institute in New York, MIT and Cornell, before being appointed to a Chair at Oxford and a Fellowship of Balliol College.
His research spans 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, 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 an ISI highly cited researcher.
Nick 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. He has recently been heavily involved in the creation and development of the MATLAB-based Chebfun software project.
In 1985, Trefethen was the first winner of the Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis, and as well as being a Fellow of the Royal Society he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the US. He became the President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in January 2011.
