Robert James Plemmons (born December 18, 1938) is an American mathematician specializing in computational mathematics. [1] He is the Emeritus Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Wake Forest University. [2] In 1979, Plemmons co-authored the book Nonnegative Matrices in the Mathematical Sciences. [3]
Plemmons was born in 1938 in the small town of Old Fort, North Carolina, and grew up in rural Appalachia. [1] He attended Old Fort High School and graduated in 1957, having been the star athlete in both baseball and football. [4]
He attended Wake Forest University (WFU) on a full baseball scholarship. [5] Former athletic director Gene Hooks was his baseball coach. [6] In 1959, he held the record for earned run average. [7] During the years 1959–61, he held the record for victories, innings pitched, strikeouts, and complete games, and made All-Conference Pitcher all three years. [7] In the academic year 1960–61, he was awarded the WFU ACC Scholar-Athlete of the Year. [8] [9] Plemmons graduated from Wake Forest in 1961 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mathematics. [1]
During the early 1960s, Plemmons played professional baseball for four years with the Baltimore Orioles' minor league clubs. [10] [11] He played with the Tri-City Atoms, Aberdeen Pheasants, and Elmira Pioneers. [12]
In December 1963, he married Mary Jo Harris, also from Old Fort and a graduate of Old Fort High School. [3] [4]
Plemmons attended graduate school at Auburn University from 1961 to 1965, receiving his PhD in Applied mathematics in 1965. [1] He then held research positions with Martin Marietta in Orlando, Florida, and the National Security Agency in Ft. Meade. [1] He served as a faculty member at the University of Mississippi from 1966 to 1967, [11] before moving to the University of Tennessee Knoxville in 1967. [1] [11] In 1981, Plemmons moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where he taught at North Carolina State University until 1990. [1] [11] While there, he founded the University of North Carolina System's Center for Research in Scientific Computation. [13] Plemmons joined the faculty of Wake Forest University in 1990. [1] In 2013, he retired from teaching, [14] but still conducts research at WFU. [15] [16] He was also the professor and mentor of former NBA and WFU basketball player Rusty LaRue. [11] [17]
Plemmons has focused his work on applied computational mathematics. [1] At Auburn in the early 1960s, Plemmons' work with PhD advisors Richard Ball and Emilie Haynsworth [1] was focused on finite semigroups theory. [18] [19] He continued this research until the early 1980s at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. [20] [21] In 1979, he co-authored the book Nonnegative Matrices in the Mathematical Sciences along with Abraham Berman. [3] The book has been cited over 7,500 times. [22] In 1994, it was revised and republished by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). [23]
In the mid-to-late 1980s until mid 1990s, his research focused on numerical linear algebra, [24] [25] [26] specifically in Matrix Theory with applications in Markov chains and nonnegative matrices. [27] [28] Plemmons has been recognized internationally for his significant contributions to the field, celebrated at the Linear Algebra: Theory, Applications, and Computations Conference held at Wake Forest University in 1999 in honor of Plemmons' 60th birthday, [1] and the International Workshop on Numerical Linear Algebra with Applications held in Hong Kong in 2013 in honor of his 75th birthday. [29]
Plemmons has been conducting research in imaging physics and applied optics at Wake Forest since the late 1990s. [1] [30] He focused initially in biometrics, including iris recognition. [31] [32] [33] His current research is in space situational awareness, tracking space debris using optical methods to prevent damage to space assets. [30]
Over the years, he has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, the Department of Energy, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. [14] His research has been continuously funded by the Department of Defense since 1973. [34]
In 1996, Plemmons delivered a congressional testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on National Security, [34] [35] in support of appropriations to the Department of Defense on behalf of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics, including the American Mathematical Society and SIAM. [35]
The mathematics lineage of Plemmons can be traced back to the German mathematicians in the 17th century. [36] Among his current peers, he is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. [37]
He is the author of more than 250 publications on computational mathematics, [22] and has served on the editorial board of six journals. [5]
James Hardy Wilkinson FRS was a prominent figure in the field of numerical analysis, a field at the boundary of applied mathematics and computer science particularly useful to physics and engineering.
Jack Joseph Dongarra is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He holds the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Turing Fellowship in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester, and is an adjunct professor and teacher in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He served as a faculty fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study (2014–2018). Dongarra is the founding director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. He was the recipient of the Turing Award in 2021.
Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) is a specification that prescribes a set of low-level routines for performing common linear algebra operations such as vector addition, scalar multiplication, dot products, linear combinations, and matrix multiplication. They are the de facto standard low-level routines for linear algebra libraries; the routines have bindings for both C and Fortran. Although the BLAS specification is general, BLAS implementations are often optimized for speed on a particular machine, so using them can bring substantial performance benefits. BLAS implementations will take advantage of special floating point hardware such as vector registers or SIMD instructions.
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific society devoted to applied mathematics, and roughly two-thirds of its membership resides within the United States. Founded in 1951, the organization began holding annual national meetings in 1954, and now hosts conferences, publishes books and scholarly journals, and engages in advocacy in issues of interest to its membership. Members include engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, both those employed in academia and those working in industry. The society supports educational institutions promoting applied mathematics.
In mathematics, a nonnegative matrix, written
Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen is an American mathematician, professor of numerical analysis and head of the Numerical Analysis Group at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.
In mathematics, a Metzler matrix is a matrix in which all the off-diagonal components are nonnegative :
In mathematics, especially linear algebra, an M-matrix is a Z-matrix with eigenvalues whose real parts are nonnegative. The set of non-singular M-matrices are a subset of the class of P-matrices, and also of the class of inverse-positive matrices. The name M-matrix was seemingly originally chosen by Alexander Ostrowski in reference to Hermann Minkowski, who proved that if a Z-matrix has all of its row sums positive, then the determinant of that matrix is positive.
In mathematics, specifically linear algebra, a real matrix A is copositive if
Nicholas John Higham FRS is a British numerical analyst. He is Royal Society Research Professor and Richardson Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester.
In numerical mathematics, relaxation methods are iterative methods for solving systems of equations, including nonlinear systems.
In linear algebra, the nonnegative rank of a nonnegative matrix is a concept similar to the usual linear rank of a real matrix, but adding the requirement that certain coefficients and entries of vectors/matrices have to be nonnegative.
Vera Nikolaevna Kublanovskaya was a Russian mathematician noted for her work on developing computational methods for solving spectral problems of algebra. She proposed the QR algorithm for computing eigenvalues and eigenvectors in 1961, which has been named as one of the ten most important algorithms of the twentieth century. This algorithm was proposed independently by the English computer scientist John G.F. Francis in 1959.
Applied mathematics is the application of mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a combination of mathematical science and specialized knowledge. The term "applied mathematics" also describes the professional specialty in which mathematicians work on practical problems by formulating and studying mathematical models.
The following is a timeline of numerical analysis after 1945, and deals with developments after the invention of the modern electronic computer, which began during Second World War. For a fuller history of the subject before this period, see timeline and history of mathematics.
Alan Stuart Edelman is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) where he leads a group in applied computing. In 2004, he founded a business called Interactive Supercomputing which was later acquired by Microsoft. Edelman is a fellow of American Mathematical Society (AMS), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), for his contributions in numerical linear algebra, computational science, parallel computing, and random matrix theory. He is one of the cocreators of the technical programming language Julia.
Shmuel Friedland is an Israeli-American mathematician.
Beresford Neill Parlett is an English applied mathematician, specializing in numerical analysis and scientific computation.
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