School of Mathematics Professor elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society

Jack Dongarra, Professor and Turing Fellow in the School of Mathematics and member of the Numerical Linear Algebra Group, has been elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. This honour recognises his seminal contributions to algorithms for numerical linear algebra and the design and development of high performance mathematical software for machines ranging from workstations to the largest parallel computers.

Professor Dongarra's software and libraries, which include LINPACK, EISPACK, LAPACK, the BLAS, MPI, ATLAS, PLASMA, MAGMA, and PAPI, are universally considered as standards, both in academia and industry. They excel in the accuracy of the underlying numerical algorithms and the reliability and performance of the software. They benefit a very wide range of users through their incorporation into software including MATLAB, Maple, Mathematica, Octave, R, SciPy and vendor libraries.

The Royal Society is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, going back to 1663. Each year the Royal Society elects up to 52 new Fellows and up to ten new Foreign Members. Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life on the basis of excellence in science. Each candidate is considered on their merits and can be proposed from any sector of the scientific community.

The full list of the newly elected Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society is available on the Royal Society website.