Nick Trefethen
American mathematician
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Early life and education
Trefethen was born 30 August 1955 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of mechanical engineer Lloyd M. Trefethen and codebreaker, poet, teacher and editor Florence Newman Trefethen. Trefethen attended Phillips Exeter Academy.
He obtained his bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1977 and his master's from Stanford University in 1980. His PhD was on Wave Propagation and Stability for Finite Difference Schemes supervised by Joseph E. Oliger at Stanford University.
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Career and research
Following his PhD, Trefethen went on to work at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cornell University, before being appointed to a chair at the University of Oxford and a Fellowship of Balliol College, Oxford.
His publications span 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. He is perhaps best known for his work on pseudospectra of non-normal matrices and operators. This work covers theoretical aspects as well as numerical algorithms, and applications including fluid mechanics, numerical solution of partial differential equations, numerical linear algebra, shuffling of cards, random matrices, differential equations and lasers. Trefethen is currently an ISI highly cited researcher.
Trefethen has written a number of books on numerical analysis including Numerical Linear Algebra with David Bau, 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:
(International System of Units)
Books
- Numerical Linear Algebra (SIAM, 1997) with David Bau
- Spectral Methods in Matlab (SIAM, 2000)
- Schwarz-Christoffel Mapping (Cambridge, 2002) with T. A. Driscoll
- Spectra and Pseudospectra: The Behavior of Nonnormal Matrices and Operators (Princeton, 2005) with Mark Embree
- Trefethen's Index Cards (World Scientific 2011)
- Approximation Theory and Approximation Practice (SIAM, 2013 and 2020)
- Exploring ODEs (SIAM, 2018) with Á. Birkisson and T. A. Driscoll
- An Applied Mathematician’s Apology (SIAM, 2022)
Personal life
Trefethen has one son and one daughter from his first marriage to Anne Elizabeth Trefethen (née Daman). He is currently married to Kate McLoughlin, a professor of English literature at Oxford.