James Demmel

James Weldon Demmel is an American mathematician and computer scientist, the Dr. Richard Carl Dehmel Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Biography

Demmel did his undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology, graduating in 1975 with a B.S. in mathematics. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science in 1983 from UC Berkeley, under the supervision of William Kahan; his dissertation was entitled A Numerical Analyst's Jordan Canonical Form. After holding a faculty position at New York University for six years, he moved to Berkeley in 1990.

Demmel is married to Katherine Yelick, who is herself a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, and Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Academic Works

Demmel is known for his work on LAPACK, a software library for numerical linear algebra and more generally for research in numerical algorithms combining mathematical rigor with high performance implementation. Prometheus, a parallel multigrid finite element solver written by Demmel, Mark Adams, and Robert Taylor, won the Carl Benz Award at Supercomputing 1999 and the Gordon Bell Prize for Adams and his coworkers at Supercomputing 2004.