Professor Nick Trefethen FRS

Nick Trefethen is Professor of Numerical Analysis and head of the Numerical Analysis Group in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford. He was educated at Harvard and Stanford and held professorial positions at NYU, MIT, and Cornell before moving to Oxford in 1997.

As an author, he is known for his books Numerical Linear Algebra (1997), Spectral Methods in MATLAB (2000), Schwarz–Christoffel Mapping (2002), Spectra and Pseudospectra (2005), Trefethen’s Index Cards (2011), and Approximation Theory and Approximation Practice (2013). He was an ISI Highly Cited Researcher, with about 100 journal publications in numerical analysis and applied mathematics, and has served as editor for many leading numerical analysis journals. He has lectured in about 20 countries and 30 US states, including invited lectures at both the ICM and ICIAM.

Some of Nick’s recent activities include the SIAM ‘100-Dollar, 100-Digit Challenge’, the notion of ‘Ten Digit Algorithms’ (ten digits, five seconds, and just one page), and the Chebfun software system for numerical computation with functions. In 2011–2012, he served as President of SIAM.

Subject groups

  • Mathematics

    Applied mathematics and theoretical physics

Professor Nick Trefethen FRS
Elected 2005

Credit: Sara Kerens