William Kahan

William M. Kahan was born on June 5, 1933, in Toronto, Canada. He received the B.A. degree in 1954 and Ph.D. in 1958, from the University of Toronto, both in Mathematics. He is a professor of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.

Among his many seminal contributions to scientific computing, Prof. Kahan was the primary architect behind the IEEE 754 and 854 standards for floating point arithmetic. These standards are implemented in virtually all commercial microprocessors manufactured for the last 20 years. Together with the late Prof. Gene Golub of Stanford University in 1965, he developed an algorithm that made the computation of the singular value decomposition (SVD) feasible. This algorithm is now considered one of the most basic tools in modern scientific computation.

Prof. Kahan received the ACM Turing Award in 1989, was named an ACM Fellow in 1994, received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award in 2000, was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and as a foreign associate of the National Academy of Engineering in 2005.

Prof. Kahan's Ph.D students at Berkeley include Scott Baden, Deb Chowdhury, Jerome Coonen, David Hough, James Demmel, Ren-Cang Li, and Pingtak "Peter" Tang.

Beresford Parlett

Beresford N. Parlett was born on July 4, 1932, in London, England. He received the B.A. degree in Mathematics at New College, Oxford University, in 1955. After 3 years in the family lumber business he went to Stanford University in 1958. He received the Ph.D. degree in Mathematics in 1962 under George Forsythe. After 2 years at Courant and a year at Stevens Tech, he came to the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 as Assistant Professor of Mathematics. At Berkeley he became Associate Professor in 1967 and Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science in 1973. He also served as Chairman of the Department of Computer Science (1968-71) and as Director of the Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics (1982-85). Since 1994 he has been Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and of Computer Science.

Parlett's research interests involve numerical solutions of and mathematical software for many problems in scientific computing. He is most well known for his contributions in eigenvalue problems, sparse matrix computations, and the Lanczos algorithm. He was the author of the influential text, The Symmetic Eigenvalue Problem.

In 2006, Parlett was awarded the SIAG/Linear Algebra Prize with Inderjit Dhillon, for their work in developing an embarrassingly parallel algorithm with minimal work requirement for the symmetric tridiagonal eigenvalue problem. This year he received the Hans Schneider Prize in Linear Algebra for his important and insightful, theoretical and numerical, contributions to numerical linear algebra, especially the symmetric eigenvalue problem.

His Ph.D. students at Berkeley include O. G. Johnson, J. R. Bunch, W. G. Poole, J. L. Nazareth, N-F. Chen, Y. Wang, D. S. Scott, T. White, A. McCurdy, A. Greenbaum, B. Nour-Omid, H. D. Simon, D. L. Taylor, K-C. Ng, J. Le, J. Li, Z. Liu, Y. Feng, T-T. Lu, D. M. Day, and Y. Yang.