Congratulations to Cleve Moler, who has won the inaugural ICIAM Industry Prize 2023 for “outstanding contributions to the development of mathematical and computational tools and methods for the solution of science and engineering problems and his invention of MATLAB”.

I first saw Cleve demonstrate the original Fortran version of MATLAB on an IBM PC at the Gatlinburg meeting at the University of Waterloo in 1984. The commercial version of MATLAB was released soon after, and it has been my main programming environment ever since.

MATLAB succeeded for a number of reasons, some of which Dennis Sherwood and I describe in one of the creativity stories in our recent book How to Be Creative: A Practical Guide for the Mathematical Sciences. But there is one reason that is rarely mentioned.

From the beginning, MATLAB supported complex arithmetic—indeed, the basic data type has always been a complex matrix. The original 1980 MATLAB Users’ Guide says

MATLAB works with essentially only one kind of object, a rectangular matrix with complex elements. If the imaginary parts of the elements are all zero, they are not printed, but they still occupy storage.

By contrast, early competing packages usually supported only real arithmetic (see my 1989 SIAM News article Matrix Computations on a PC for a comparison of PC-MATLAB and GAUSS). Cleve understood the fundamental need to compute in the complex plane in real life problems, as opposed to textbook examples, and he appreciated how tedious it is to program with real and imaginary parts stored in separate arrays. The storing of zero imaginary parts of real numbers was a small price to pay for the convenience. Of course, the commercial version of MATLAB was optimized not to store the imaginary part of reals. Control engineers—a group who were early adopters of MATLAB—appreciated the MATLAB approach, because the stability of control systems depends on eigenvalues, which are in general complex.

Another wise choice was that MATLAB allows the imaginary unit to be written as i or j, thus keeping mathematicians and electrical engineers happy!

Here is Cleve demonstrating MATLAB in October 2000:

By Len Freeman, Nick Higham and Jim Nagy.

Ian Gladwell passed away on May 23, 2021 at the age of 76. He was born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1944. He did his secondary education at Thornleigh College, Bolton and was an undergraduate at Hertford College, University of Oxford, from where he graduated with a B.A. Hons. in Mathematics in 1966. He did his postgraduate studies at the University of Manchester, gaining an MSc in Numerical Analysis and Computing in 1967 and a PhD in Numerical Analysis in 1970. He was the first PhD student of Christopher T. H. Baker (1939–2017).

Ian was appointed Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester in 1969 and progressed to Senior Lecturer in 1980. He was a member of the Numerical Analysis Group (along with Christopher Baker, Len Freeman, George Hall, Will McLewin, Jack Williams (1943–2015), and Joan Walsh (1932–2017)) who, together with colleagues at UMIST, made Manchester a major centre of numerical analysis activity from the 1970s onwards.

Ian’s research focused on ordinary differential equation (ODE) initial value problems and boundary value problems, mathematical software, and parallel computing, and he had a wide knowledge of numerical analysis and scientific computing. He was perhaps best known for his pioneering work on mathematical software for the numerical solution of ODEs, much of which was published in the NAG Library and in the journal ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software. A particular topic of interest for Ian was algorithms and software for the numerical solution of almost block diagonal linear systems, which arise in discretizations of boundary value problems for ODEs and partial differential equations.

More details on Ian’s publications can be found at his MathSciNet author profile (subscription required). It lists 55 publications with 19 co-authors, among which Richard Brankin, Larry Shampine, Ruth Thomas, and Marcin Paprzycki are his most frequent co-authors.

In his time at Manchester he collaborated with a variety of colleagues both inside and outside the department, and he was always ready to offer advice to students and colleagues across the campus on numerical computing (as evidenced by the common sight of people waiting outside his office door to be seen).

Ian was instrumental in setting up the Manchester Numerical Analysis Reports, a long-running technical report series to which he contributed many items.

Ian had a five-month visit to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1975. Links between the Manchester and Toronto departments were strong, and over the years numerical analysts made several visits in both directions.

In the mid 1980s, Ian was one of the first people in the UK to have an email address: igladwel@uk.ac.ucl.cs. His email account was on a computer at University College London (UCL), because UCL hosted a gateway between JANET, the UK computer network, and ARPANET in the USA. Ian kindly allowed Nick Higham and Len Freeman use of the account to communicate with colleagues in the US.

Ian had long-standing collaborations with the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) Ltd., Oxford. He contributed many codes and associated documentation to the NAG Library, principally in ordinary differential equations. In a 1979 paper in ACM Trans. Math. Software he wrote

“When the NAG library structure was designed in the late 1960s, it was decided to devote a chapter, named DO2, to the numerical solution of systems of ordinary differential equations and that this chapter would be contributed by members of the Department of Mathematics, University of Manchester, and in particular by J. E. Walsh, G. Hall, and the author.”

Ian was a long-term member of NAG and of the NAG Technical Policy Committee, and during 1986 he held a Royal Society/Science and Engineering Research Council Industrial Fellowship at NAG.

Nick Higham was taught by Ian in an upper level undergraduate course “Numerical Linear Algebra” that Ian was giving for the first time, in 1981. As an MSc student and PhD student he benefited greatly from Ian’s advice about how to think about and do research.

Ian moved to the Department of Mathematics at Southern Methodist University (SMU), Dallas, as a Visiting Associate Professor in 1987, which became a permanent position in 1988. He had collaborated during the 1980s with Larry Shampine, who was working at Sandia National Laboratories until he moved to the SMU Mathematics Department in 1986.

Ian served as chair of the department 1988–1994 and again in 1998. He was also Director of Graduate Studies from 2005–2008. Ian excelled in these roles as mentor, which is recognized by a PhD fellowship in his honor. Jim Nagy was extremely fortunate to have Ian as his first department chair in 1992; Ian mentored him during the challenging tenure-track years, advising on research, teaching and more, including extensive editing of his first successful grant proposals.

Ian wrote the book Solving ODEs with MATLAB (2003) with Larry Shampine and Skip Thompson, which was described as “an excellent treatment of the fundamentals for solving ODEs using MATLAB” in Mathematical Reviews. It is Ian’s most highly cited work, with around 900 citations on Google Scholar at the time of writing.

Ian served as editor for ten journals, including as Associate Editor (2002–2005) and Editor-in-Chief (2005–2008) of ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, as Associate Editor of the IMA Journal on Numerical Analysis (1988–2007), and as Associate Editor of Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience (2005–2010). A special issue of the latter journal in 2009 was dedicated to him on the occasion of his retirement from SMU

Ian was a long-term member of the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications, of which he was a Fellow, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

According to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, Ian had 23 PhD students, equally split between Manchester and SMU, with one jointly supervised at the University of Bari.

Today is the 80th birthday of Cleve Moler. Most readers will know Cleve as the inventor of MATLAB. MATLAB was originally a Fortran program that Cleve wrote to give students easier access to the EISPACK and LINPACK libraries. Cleve and John Little later founded The MathWorks and turned MATLAB into a commercial product.

Cleve was a speaker at the conference Advances in Numerical Linear Algebra: Celebrating the Centenary of the Birth of James H. Wilkinson held in Manchester last May. We took the opportunity there to celebrate Cleve’s birthday in advance. A video of Cleve’s talk is included below.

Most recently I saw Cleve at the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) conference in Valencia, where he spoke in the minisymposium Bohemian Matrices and Applications that I organized with Rob Corless. See Cleve’s blog post about his talk.

Happy birthday, Cleve!

(Photo credits: Gian Maria Negri Porzio.)

By Len Freeman and Nick Higham

Joan Eileen Walsh was born on 7 October 1932 and passed away on 30 December 2017 at the age of 85.

Joan obtained a First Class B.A. honours degree in Mathematics from the University of Oxford in 1954. She then spent three years working as an Assistant Mistress at Howell’s School in Denbigh, North Wales. In 1957 Joan left teaching and enrolled at the University of Cambridge to study for a Diploma in Numerical Analysis. This qualification was awarded, with Distinction, in 1958. At this point, Joan returned to the University of Oxford Computing Laboratory to study for a D.Phil. under the supervision of Professor Leslie Fox. She was Fox’s first doctoral student. Her D.Phil. was awarded in 1961.

Between October 1960 and March 1963, Joan worked as a Mathematical Programmer for the CEGB (Central Electricity Generating Board) Computing Department in London. In April 1963, she was appointed to a Lectureship in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. She progressed through the positions of Senior Lecturer (1966) and Reader (1971) before being appointed as Professor of Numerical Analysis at the University of Manchester in October 1974. For the academic year 1967-1968 Joan had leave of absence at the SRC Atlas Computer Laboratory—a joint appointment with St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

Joan led the Numerical Analysis group at the University of Manchester until 1985, after which Christopher Baker took over. This was a period of expansion both for the Numerical Analysis group at Manchester and, more generally, for numerical analysis in Britain. This expansion of British numerical analysis was supported by special grants from the SRC (Science Research Council) to provide additional funding for the subject at the Universities of Dundee, Manchester and Oxford, from 1973 until 1976. This funding supported one Senior Research Fellow and two Research Fellows at each Institution. Joan helped establish the Manchester group as one of the leading Numerical Analysis research centres in the United Kingdom (with eight permanent staff by 1987)—a position that is maintained to the present day.

Joan was Head of the Department of Mathematics between 1986 and 1989, and subsequently became Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Manchester in 1990. She held the latter role for four years, and was responsible for undergraduate affairs across the University. Joan’s tenure as Pro-Vice Chancellor coincided with substantial, and sometimes controversial, changes in undergraduate teaching—for example, the introduction of semesterisation and of credit-based degree programmes; Joan managed these major changes across the University with her customary tact, energy and determination. Joan was an efficient and effective administrator at a time when relatively few women occupied senior management roles in universities.

After 35 years’ service, Joan retired from the University in 1998 and was appointed Professor Emeritus.

In retirement, Joan returned to her studies; between 2000 and 2003 she studied for an MA in “Contemporary Theology in the Catholic Tradition” at Heythrop College of the University of London.

Over the years, and particularly during her tenure as Pro-Vice Chancellor, Joan sat on, and chaired, numerous University committees, far too many to list. She had a very long relationship with Allen Hall (a University Hall of Residence) where she was on the Hall Advisory Committee from 1975 until her retirement in 1998.

Joan served leadership roles nationally, as well as in the University. She was Vice President of the IMA (1992-1993) and a member of the Council of the IMA (1990-1991 and 1994-1995). She was elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) in 1984. She was a member of the Computer Board for Universities and Research Councils for several years from the late 1970s. She encouraged the creation of its Software Provision Committee, formally constituted in 1980 with Joan as its first Chairman, which she led until 1985. She was also President of the National Conference of University Professors (1993–1994). Further, she was a member of the Board of Governors at Withington Girls’ School, a leading independent school, for six years between 1993 and 1999.

Nowadays, all computational scientists take for granted the existence of software libraries such as the NAG Library. It is unimaginable to undertake major computational tasks without them. In 1970, Joan was one of a group of four academics who founded the Nottingham Algorithms Group with the aim of developing a comprehensive mathematical software library for use by the group of universities that were running ICL 1906A mainframe computers. Subsequently, the Nottingham Algorithms Group moved from the University of Nottingham to the University of Oxford and the project was incorporated as the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) Ltd. Joan became the Founding Chairman of NAG Ltd. in 1976, a position she held for the next ten years. She was subsequently a member of the Council of NAG Ltd. from 1992 until 1996. In recognition of her contribution to the NAG project Joan was elected as a Founding Member of the NAG Life Service Recognition Award in 2011.

Joan’s research interests focused on the numerical solution of ordinary differential equation boundary value problems and the numerical solution of partial differential equations. She conducted much of her research in collaboration with PhD students, supervising the following PhD students at the University of Manchester, who obtained their degrees in the years shown:

• Thomas Sag, 1966;
• Les Graney, 1973;
• David Sayers, 1973;
• Geoffrey McKeown, 1977;
• Roderick Cook, 1978;
• Patricia Hanson, 1979;
• Guy Lonsdale, 1985;
• Chan Basaruddin, 1990;
• Fathalla Rihan (supervised jointly with C. T. H. Baker), 2000.

Joan was an important figure in the development of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing at the University of Manchester and in the UK more generally. Her essay Numerical Analysis at the Victoria University of Manchester, 1957-1979 gives an interesting perspective on early developments at Manchester.

Brian Ford OBE, Founder Director of NAG, writes:

Joan had a brilliant career in Mathematics (particularly areas of Numerical Mathematics, Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations), Computing, University Education and Teaching, and was an excellent researcher, teacher, administrator, doctoral supervisor and colleague. But she was so much more than that!

Joan was invariably kind and thoughtful, intellectually gifted and generous with advice and guidance. Her profound Christian faith illuminated every aspect of her life. Joan’s deep reading and wide intellectual interests coupled with her prudence and clear thinking gave her profound knowledge and command. She was excellent company –amusing, modest, never belittling nor intimidating- and enjoyed fine wine and food in good company. She held firm beliefs, gently and persuasively seeking what she saw as the right way. Many people turned to her for help, advice and references and were grateful for her readily-offered help and support.

Joan was a private, even guarded, person. A devout Catholic, on her retirement she completed an MA in “Contemporary Theology in the Catholic Tradition” at Heythorp College, University of London. Fluent in Latin and reading regularly at services, she loved the traditional Tridentine Mass of the Church. Along with her local bishop in Salford and other like-minded Catholics, she therefore worked actively for the restitution of the Tridentine Mass to the liturgy of the world-wide Church (sidelined after Vatican II in favour of local languages), an involvement which culminated her joining high-level discussions at the Vatican. This bore fruit, the Tridentine Latin Mass being officially declared the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite of Mass a few years later: Joan was thrilled. Such was Joan’s commitment to things she believed in and her endless thought and work for others.

Joan was an excellent contributor to the NAG Library, believing strongly in collaboration and sharing, with high quality standards for all aspects of our work and thorough checking and testing. She was an excellent first Chairman of NAG and invaluable colleague and advisor. We thoroughly enjoyed working together, invariably in an excellent spirit. We achieved much.

By Nick Higham and Neville Ford (University of Chester)

Christopher Thomas Hale Baker died on August 20, 2017 at the age of 78. He was born on the Isle of Thanet, Kent, in 1939, and was educated at Colchester Royal Grammar School and Jesus College Oxford, where he held an Edwin Jones Scholarship and a State Scholarship.

His first full-time employment was between school and college, when he worked in the Physics Research Laboratory of BX Plastics. He obtained his BA in 1961 and his M.A. and D.Phil., in 1964, from the University of Oxford. Between 1964 and 1966 he held a Fulbright Award and was Instructor and PG Research Mathematician at UC Berkeley. From 1966 Christopher was lecturer, senior lecturer and then reader at the University of Manchester, becoming professor in 1989. He had periods of leave at the University of Toronto (in 1972 and 1976) and Oxford University.

Christopher served as head of the numerical analysis group for around ten years and served as Head of Department for three years from September 1995. Following his retirement in 2004, Christopher joined the University of Chester as a part-time member of the department, retiring from that role in 2016. At the time of his death he held the title of Emeritus Professor at both the University of Manchester and the University of Chester.

Christopher was founding Director of the Manchester Centre for Computational Mathematics (MCCM), formed in 1992 by the numerical analysis groups at the University of Manchester and UMIST to build on existing collaborations. In his ten years as Director, the centre grew substantially in activity, as seen particularly in the Numerical Analysis Report series, and the M.Sc. in Numerical Analysis and Computing. Christopher was instrumental in involving external researchers in MCCM, notably the Chester numerical analysts.

His research interests included numerical solution of integral equations and functional differential equations (integro-differential and delay-differential equations), and parameter estimation in models. He is perhaps best-known for his monumental 1034-page monograph Numerical Treatment of Integral Equations (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1977). He was able to expand some of the tools and techniques developed for integral equations into newly emerging fields of numerical dynamics and numerical methods for stochastic differential equations.

Christopher organized two Durham Symposia. The first, “Numerical Treatment of Integral Equations” (1982), was attended by 67 mathematicians from around the world. The second, “Evolutionary Problems: Continuous and Discretized Nonlinear Systems” (July 4-14, 1992), organized jointly with Ruth Thomas, had 92 attendees.

In his introduction to the 2000 annual report of MCCM, Christopher offered some thoughts on the nature of Numerical Analysis.

“To some, the emphasis should be on computational mathematics, to others the emphasis should be on a unifying perspective from the viewpoint of applied analysis. To the writer, numerical analysis is ideally a broad church and like other sections of applied mathematics should be informed by modelling considerations, investigations based on simulation or analysis, and the practicalities of modern computing. As an integrated part of applied mathematics, the skills developed in numerical analysis complement and are complemented by perspectives obtained from other areas; numerical analysis should be supported by insights from modelling, and from the more abstract areas of mathematics, and computer science.”

Those words strike us as just as valid today as when Christopher wrote them seventeen years ago.

Christopher was a member of the 1992 Mathematics Assessment Panel in the UFC Research Assessment Exercise and of the Applied Mathematics panel in the 1996 Research Assessment Exercise. He chaired the Applied Mathematics panel in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. Serving on three successive panels was a major service to the mathematics community. Some idea of this is given by Christopher’s comment in the 2002 MCCM annual report, “During most of 2001, every flat surface at home and in my office was covered with RAE paperwork”.

He was a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and served as editor of the IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis from its foundation in 1981 to 1996. He was a dedicated editor, also giving long service to other journals including Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Journal of Integral Equations and Applications, and Advances in Computational Mathematics.

Here is a list of his PhD students (complete as far as we know), with their last known affiliations.

• Ian Gladwell (Southern Methodist University, Dallas)
• Malcolm Keech (University of Bedfordshire)
• Siamak Amini (University of Salford)
• Athena Makroglou (University of Portsmouth)
• Mishi Derakshan (Dassault Systems BIOVIA)
• Neville Ford (University of Chester)
• Christopher Paul (University of Manchester)
• David Willé (Heidelberg, Germany)
• Arsalang Tang (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada)
• Fathalla A. Rihan (United Arab Emirates University)
• Ali Filiz (Adnan Menderes University, Turkey)
• Hongjiong Tian (Shanghai Normal University, China)
• Yihong Song (Suzhou University, Jiangsu, China)
• Ephraim O. Agyingi (Rochester Institute of Technology, NY)
• Eugene Parmuzin (INMRAS, Moscow, Russia)

Christopher had heart bypass surgery in 1988 and the surgeon told him “We know these vein grafts last for 12 years”. Thankfully, that was a severe underestimate, and Christopher maintained all his usual activities right until the end.

Christopher will be remembered as a kind, generous, and sociable colleague as well as for his leadership in applied mathematics and numerical analysis in Manchester, Chester, across the UK, and beyond.

Christopher is survived by his wife Helen, his children Deborah and Mark, and four grandchildren

Nick writes:

Christopher was a student at Oxford when Leslie Fox was Professor of Numerical Analysis and head of the Computing Laboratory. According to David Sayers, Fox used to refer to Christopher as “that pure mathematician”—presumably because of the rigorous mathematical approach that Christopher used in his research on the numerical treatment of integral equations. When I was a PhD student I remember hearing of a seminar where the speaker showed how to solve numerically an integral equation for which there was later shown to be no solution. Christopher would never fall into such a trap! He served for three years on the adjudicating committee for the Leslie Fox prize, chairing it in 1997. He dedicated a paper (“Parallel continuous Runge-Kutta methods and vanishing lag delay differential equations”, 1993) to the memory of Leslie Fox.

Christopher was a shrewd operator at faculty level. He secured many promotions in the department at a time when they were limited by university finances. He was responsible for mathematics being chosen as the location for a large PC cluster in the early days of the use of PCs for teaching. I found a 1993 email in which Christopher wrote, to colleagues in the department, many of whom were not au fait with computing:

“You may ask why it is thought that computers can assist teaching … Computers can be used to yield visual and numerical insight, if the right packages are used. They can also access databases (library catalogues, journal and book reviews, etc.) The international trends are quite clear. It is also quite clear that computers are a genuine aid to modern mathematical research and development; some of our graduates will become real mathematicians.”

Christopher was an enthusiastic early adopter of email, originally on the university CMS system. He was professor in charge of computing for many years in the 1990s: a major task in a time of rapid change.

Neville writes:

Christopher’s involvement with colleagues at the University of Chester stems from his collaboration with me that has lasted more than 30 years. My former pure mathematics tutor, Brian Steer (who had been a student with Christopher during his time at Jesus College) put me in touch with Christopher as somebody who could supervise me (interests in functional and classical analysis) and help me establish myself in numerical analysis. As Nick describes, Christopher was always shrewd. I recognise the way careful supervision encouraged students to play to their strengths and to answer research questions which other people would find to be interesting. He frequently reminded us all that no question is worth answering unless somebody other than the author of the paper is asking it. I also remember being challenged repeatedly by his question ‘what do you mean by …’ (stability, for example) reflecting his determination to understand the underlying mathematics before venturing an opinion on a numerical scheme.

Christopher was responsible for inviting members of the Chester mathematics team to join with the Manchester Centre for Computational Mathematics, a co-operation which worked very effectively for our emerging research group, and on his retirement from Manchester we were pleased to welcome him as a member of our team, so collaborations between Christopher and the Chester group continued to develop. Even though some new members of our group had known him only for a short time before his death, they describe how much he continued to help by challenging their thinking, suggesting interesting fresh insights and contributing to the seminar programme.

Updated October 4, 2017 to correct the list of PhD students.