- Alston Scott Householder
Alston Scott Householder (
Rockford ,Illinois ,USA ,5 May 1904 – Malibu,California ,USA ,4 July 1993 ) was an American mathematician who specialized inmathematical biology andnumerical analysis , inventor of theHouseholder transformation and ofHouseholder's method . Married to Belle Householder (died 1975), children: John, Jackie and remarried 1984 to Heidi Householder, née Vogg.Householder spent his youth in
Alabama ; getting a BA in philosophy from theNorthwestern University ofEvanston, Illinois in 1925, and an MA, also in philosophy, fromCornell University in 1927. He taught mathematics while preparing for his PhD, which was awarded at theUniversity of Chicago in 1937. His thesis dealt with the topic of thecalculus of variations .After receiving his doctorate, Householder concentrated on the field of mathematical biology, working with several other researchers with
Nicolas Rashevsky at the University of Chicago.In 1946, Householder joined the Mathematics Division of the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory , where he was appointed chair in 1948; it is during this period that his interests shift towardnumerical analysis . In 1969 he left ORNL to become Professor of Mathematics at theUniversity of Tennessee , where he eventually became chairman. In 1974 he retired to and went to live in Malibu, California.Householder has contributed in different ways to the organisation of research. He has been president of the
American Mathematical Society , president ofSIAM and of theAssociation for Computing Machinery . He was a member of the redactional committees for "Psychometrika", "Numerische Mathematik", "Linear Algebra and Its Applications", and has been editor in chief of the "SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis". He opened up his wide personal bibliography onnumerical algebra in form of a KWIC index. He also organized the important "Gatlinburg Conferences", which are still held under the name "Householder Symposia".External links
*MacTutor Biography|id=Householder
* [http://www.maths.strath.ac.uk/~caas63/householder/stewart.html Biography] by G. W. Stewart
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