James H. Wilkinson

James Hardy Wilkinson (1919 to 1986), known as Jim, was an English mathematician who worked in numerical analysis. Born in Strood in Kent, he won a Foundation Scholarship to Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School in Rochester at eleven and a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge at sixteen, where Hardy, Littlewood and Besicovitch taught him. The Second World War turned him from classical analysis to numerical work on explosions, ballistics and shell fragmentation. In 1946 he became Alan Turing's assistant at the National Physical Laboratory, worked on the ACE computer project and took a leading role in the Pilot ACE machine. He developed backward error analysis in numerical linear algebra, worked on linear systems and eigenvalue problems, and is best known for his books Rounding Errors in Algebraic Processes and The Algebraic Eigenvalue Problem. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969 and received the Turing Award in 1970.