CSE Seminar
SPEAKER: Joseph Grcar,
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
TITLE:
John von Neumann's Analysis of Gaussian Elimination: the Founding of
Modern Numerical Analysis
DATE: Wednesday, November 7, 2007
TIME: 11:00 A.M.
PLACE: 2240 DCL
1304 W. Springfield Ave., Urbana, IL
ABSTRACT
Just when modern computers were being invented, John von Neumann and
Herman Goldstine wrote a paper to illustrate the mathematical analyses
that they believed would be needed to use the new machines effectively
and to guide the development of still faster computers. Their
foresight and the congruence of historical events made their work the
first modern paper in numerical analysis. Von Neumann once remarked
that to found a mathematical theory one had to prove the first theorem,
which he and Goldstine did concerning the accuracy of mechanized
Gaussian elimination — but their paper was about more than that.
Von Neumann and Goldstine described what they surmised would be the
significant questions once computers became available for computational
science, and they suggested enduring ways to answer them.