Nick Higham handed away final Saturday. Nick was an in depth pal of mine and an excellent pal of MATLAB. I’ll go away it to others to explain his analysis and educating, his many honors, and his service to our neighborhood, particularly SIAM. I’ve just some, extra private, feedback.
Contents
NA Digest
Monday’s NA Digest led off with this from Nick’s spouse Francoise and his brother Des.
Topic: Nick Higham (1961--2024)
With nice disappointment we report that Nick Higham, Royal Society Analysis Professor and Richardson Professor of Utilized Arithmetic on the College of Manchester, handed away on January 20, 2024, on the age of 62 after an 18 month battle with a type of blood most cancers. An obituary describing Nick's analysis and management contributions will seem in SIAM Information sooner or later.
Francoise Tisseur and Des Higham
Books
Nick was a wonderful author, and a very good author about writing.
Listed here are the covers of his six books.
SIAM revealed 5 of those. Two are surveys of Nick’s analysis on the accuracy of numeric algorithms and the computation of matrix features. Two extra, certainly one of them coauthored with Dennis Sherwood, are guides to mathematical exposition.
MATLAB Information, by Des and Nick Higham, is certainly one of my favourite books about MATLAB. It’s a succinct introduction for newcomers and a useful refresher for old-timers. The third version, revealed in 2017, consists of chapters on object-oriented computing, parallel computing, the Symbolic Math Toolbox and different latest additions. Remember to try the MATLAB Information website online.
The one non-SIAM guide pictured above is The Princeton Companion to Utilized Arithmetic. It’s over 1,000 pages lengthy and options practically 200 sections written by an worldwide workforce of specialists. Nick is the editor-in-chief and wrote lots of the sections himself.
MATLAB
Here’s a Phrase Cloud from Nick’s dwelling web page. It exhibits the frequency of the tags for his weblog and confirms his curiosity in MATLAB.
gallery
Anybody eager about numerical linear algebra must also have an interest within the gallery perform, which is predicated in Nick’s work. Enter
>> doc gallery
Scroll all the way down to matrixname and examine over 70 totally different take a look at matrices.
Should you discover gallery irresistible, check out anymatrix, an extensible matrix assortment, by Nick and Mantas Mikaitis.
expm
That is very private for me. Thirty or forty years in the past, Charlie Van Mortgage and I have been considered authorities on computing the matrix exponential, $e^{A}$. The perform expm has been in MATLAB since its very starting. Round twenty years in the past, we ceded the authority title to Nick and Awad Al-Mohy. Their code for matrix exponential is now the premise for expm.
Goodbye
Our enterprise has misplaced certainly one of its superstars. I’ve misplaced a very good pal, approach too quickly. Goodbye Nick.
Revealed with MATLAB® R2023a
