Person: Wilkinson, James Hardy

Jim Wilkinson was an English mathematician who worked in numerical analysis.

At this stage Wilkinson seemed set to become a classical analyst but the Second World War changed the direction of his research.
In 1940, rather than going into the infantry, Wilkinson began war work on the thermodynamics of explosions, ballistics, supersonic flow, and fragmentation of shells.
After the successful demonstration, Wilkinson realised for the first time that he would now be expected to do useful work on the Pilot ACE computer, which, until that moment, he had only though of as a means of convincing others that the ACE project had potential and should be continued.
As well as the large numbers of papers on his theoretical work on numerical analysis, Wilkinson developed computer software, working on the production of libraries of numerical routines.
The NAG (Numerical Algorithms Group) began work in 1970 and much of the linear algebra routines were due to Wilkinson.

Born 27 September 1919, Strood, Kent, England. Died 5 October 1986, Teddington, Middlesex, England.

View full biography at MacTutor

Origin England

Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0!

O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive