Dr. Martín Abadi
Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen MEMBERS
Chair, University of Oxford
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
More Info
  • 2009
  • Fundamental and Mathematics Sciences (F.M.S.)
More Info
  • 2009
  • Fundamental and Mathematics Sciences (F.M.S.)
Election Remark
Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen (born 30 August 1955) is an American mathematician, professor of numerical analysis and head of the Numerical Analysis Group at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. His PhD was on Wave Propagation and Stability for Finite Difference Schemes supervised by Joseph E. Oliger at Stanford University.
 
As of 2020, he has published around 150 journal papers spanning 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.
 
Trefethen has written a number of books on numerical analysis including Numerical Linear Algebra, 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 is the leader of the MATLAB-based Chebfun software project. In 2013, he proposed a new formula to calculate the BMI of a person. Trefethen was the first winner of the Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis.
 
In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.

He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States.

Trefethen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2005.

He was elected as member of the European Academy of Engineering in 2009.

In 2010 Trefethen was awarded the Gold Medal of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in recognition of his "outstanding contributions to mathematics and its applications over a period of years". In 2013.

Trefethen was awarded the Naylor Prize and lectureship in Applied Mathematics from the London Mathematical Society.

He was awarded the George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 2017 and the John von Neumann Prize in 2020 by SIAM.