We are delighted to announce that the Council of the IMA has awarded the IMA Gold Medal 2020 to Professor Nicholas (Nick) J Higham FRS of the University of Manchester.
Institute Gold Medals are awarded in recognition of outstanding contributions to mathematics and its applications over a period of years, with nominations being considered every two years.
The citation for this year’s award to Professor Nick Higham follows.
Citation
Nick Higham is Royal Society Research Professor and Richardson Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics, University of Manchester. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007 and was awarded a Royal Society Research Professorship in 2018. He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), a Turing Fellow and a Member of Academia Europaea. He held a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award (2003-2008).
Higham is best known for his work on the accuracy and stability of numerical algorithms, and the second edition of his 700-page monograph on this topic was published by SIAM in 2002. His most recent monograph, Functions of Matrices: Theory and Computation (SIAM, 2008), is the first book devoted to this topic. He is the Editor of the Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics (2015, over 1000 pages).
He has more than 140 refereed publications on topics such as rounding error analysis, linear systems, least squares problems, matrix functions and nonlinear matrix equations, condition number estimation, and polynomial eigenvalue problems. His research has been supported by grants from EPSRC and by fellowships from the Nuffield Foundation, the Royal Society and the Leverhulme Trust. He held a 2M euro ERC Advanced Grant (2011-2016) supporting his research on matrix functions.
He served as President of SIAM (2017-18), and was Vice President at Large (2010-2013) and served for over ten years on the SIAM Board of Trustees and the SIAM Council. He has also served on the Board of Directors of the International Linear Algebra Society, and as Chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra. He was a member of the Applied Mathematics sub-panel for the 2008 UK Research Assessment Exercise and the Mathematical Sciences sub-panel of the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework.
Higham’s speciality is Numerical Linear Algebra and he follows in the Wilkinson tradition with a world leading background in error analysis. He also leads one of the largest groups in this area in the UK and indeed in all of Europe.
He has contributed software to LAPACK and the NAG library, and has written numerous M-files included in MATLAB. His algorithms are also included in Julia, SciPy, Mathematica and other packages.
Higham is also author of the best-selling SIAM books Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences (3rd edition, 2020) and MATLAB Guide (with D. J. Higham, 3rd edition, 2017), and is a contributor to the popular Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics (fourth edition, 2008).
