Beresford Parlett

Beresford Neill Parlett (July 4, 1932 – February 7, 2026) was an English applied mathematician, who specialised in numerical analysis and scientific computation.

Life and career Parlett received in 1955 his bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Oxford and then worked in his father's timber business for three years. From 1958 to 1962 he was a graduate student in mathematics at Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1962. He was a postdoc for two years at Manhattan's Courant Institute and one year at the Stevens Institute of Technology. From 1965 until his retirement, he was a faculty member of the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley. There he served for some years as chair of the department of computer science, director of the Center for Pure and Applied Mathematics, and professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science. He was a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris VI), and the University of Oxford.

He was the author of many influential papers on the numerical solution of eigenvalue problems, the QR algorithm, the Lanczos algorithm, symmetric indefinite systems, and sparse matrix computations.

Awards and honours 2006 — (jointly with Inderjit S. Dhillon) SIAM Activity Group Linear Algebra Best Paper Prize 2010 — Hans Schneider Prize in Linear Algebra 2011 — Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Fellow

arXiv preprint (See Bertram Kostant and Nolan Wallach.)

Books SIAM corrected edition of the original publication by Prentice-Hall in 1980