The birth of numerical analysis

The 1947 paper by John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine, “Numerical Inverting of Matrices of High Order” (Bulletin of the AMS, Nov. 1947), is considered as the birth certificate of numerical analysis.

Since its publication, the evolution of this domain has been enormous.

This book is a unique collection of contributions by researchers who have lived through this evolution, testifying about their personal experiences and sketching the evolution of their respective subdomains since the early years.Sample Chapter(s)Chapter 1: Some pioneers of extrapolation methods (323 KB)Contents: Some Pioneers of Extrapolation Methods (C Brezinski)Very Basic Multidimensional Extrapolation Quadrature (J N Lyness)Numerical Methods for Ordinary Differential Equations: Early Days (J C Butcher)Interview with Herbert Bishop Keller (H M Osinga)A Personal Perspective on the History of the Numerical Analysis of Fredholm Integral Equations of the Second Kind (K Atkinson)Memoires on Building on General Purpose Numerical Algorithms Library (B Ford)Recent Trends in High Performance Computing (J J Dongarra et al.)Nonnegativity Constraints in Numerical Analysis (D-H Chen & R J Plemmons)On Nonlinear Optimization Since 1959 (M J D Powell)The History and Development of Numerical Analysis in Scotland: A Personal Perspective (G Alistair Watson)Remembering Philip Rabinowitz (P J Davis & A S Fraenkel) My Early Experiences with Scientific Computation (P J Davis)Applications of Chebyshev Polynomials: From Theoretical Kinematics to Practical Computations (R Piessens)Readership: Mathematicians in numerical analysis and mathematicians who are interested in the history of mathematics.