Nicholas Higham

Biography

Nick Higham is Richardson Professor of Applied Mathematics in the School of Mathematics, University of Manchester. His degrees (BA 1982, MSc 1983, PhD 1985) are from the University of Manchester, and he has held visiting positions at Cornell University and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, University of Minnesota. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007, is a SIAM Fellow, and held a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award (2003-2008).

He is well known for his research on the accuracy and stability of numerical algorithms, and the second edition of his 700-page monograph on this topic was published by SIAM in 2002. His most recent book, Functions of Matrices: Theory and Computation (SIAM, 2008), is the first research monograph devoted to this topic.

He has more than 100 refereed publications on topics such as rounding error analysis, linear systems, least squares problems, matrix functions and nonlinear matrix equations, condition number estimation, and polynomial eigenvalue problems. His research has been supported by grants from EPSRC and by fellowships from the Nuffield Foundation, the Royal Society and the Leverhulme Trust. He currently holds a 2M euro ERC Advanced Grant (2011-2015) supporting his research on matrix functions.

Higham is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Forum of Mathematics, Foundations of Computational Mathematics. IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, Linear Algebra and Its Applications, Numerical Algorithms and SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications. He is also (Founding) Editor-in-Chief of the SIAM Fundamentals of Algorithms book series.

Higham has contributed software to LAPACK and the NAG library, and has written numerous M-files included in MATLAB.

Honours include the Alston S. Householder Award VI, 1987 (for the best Ph.D. thesis in numerical algebra 1984--1987), the 1988 Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis, a 1999 Junior Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society, designation as a "Highly Cited Researcher" by Thomson/ISI in 2006, and the 2008 Fröhlich Prize of the London Mathematical Society.

Higham is also author of the best-selling SIAM books Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences (2nd edition, 1998) and MATLAB Guide (with D. J. Higham, 2nd edition, 2005), and is a contributor to the popular Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics (fourth edition, 2008).