You are here

The Birth of Numerical Analysis

Adhemar Bultheel and Ronald Cools, editors
Publisher: 
World Scientific
Publication Date: 
2010
Number of Pages: 
221
Format: 
Hardcover
Price: 
80.00
ISBN: 
9789812836250
Category: 
Anthology
[Reviewed by
Allen Stenger
, on
03/6/2010
]

This volume is the proceedings of a conference held in Leuven, Belgium, in 2007 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the beginning of numerical analysis. Of course mathematicians have been making numerical calculations for hundreds of years, but the organizers considered that “modern” numerical analysis started with the 1947 paper of von Neumann and Goldstine, “Numerical inverting of matrices of high order,” which was the first to consider carefully the propagation of errors.

There are no stand-out papers in the collection. They are a mixture of reminiscences of the early days, surveys of developments in a narrow area during the past 60 years, or fresh looks at ideas that were current in the beginning days.


Allen Stenger is a math hobbyist and retired software developer. He is webmaster and newsletter editor for the MAA Southwestern Section and is an editor of the Missouri Journal of Mathematical Sciences. His mathematical interests are number theory and classical analysis. He volunteers in his spare time at MathNerds.com, a math help site that fosters inquiry learning.

  • Some Pioneers of Extrapolation Methods (C Brezinski)
  • Very Basic Multidimensional Extrapolation Quadrature (J N Lyness)
  • Numerical Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations: Early Days (J C Butcher)
  • Interview with Herbert Bishop Keller (H M Osinga)
  • A Personal Perspective on the History of the Numerical Analysis of Fredholm Integral Equations of the Second Kind (K Atkinson)
  • Memoires on Building on General Purpose Numerical Algorithms Library (B Ford)
  • Recent Trends in High Performance Computing (J J Dongarra et al.)
  • Nonnegativity Constraints in Numerical Analysis (D-H Chen & R J Plemmons)
  • On Nonlinear Optimization Since 1959 (M J D Powell)
  • The History and Development of Numerical Analysis in Scotland: A Personal Perspective (G Alistair Watson)
  • Remembering Philip Rabinowitz (P J Davis & A S Fraenkel)
  • My Early Experiences with Scientific Computation (P J Davis)
  • Applications of Chebyshev Polynomials: From Theoretical Kinematics to Practical Computations (R Piessens)