Lloyd N. Trefethen

Early life and education Trefethen was born 30 August 1955 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of mechanical engineer Lloyd M. Trefethen and codebreaker, poet, teacher and editor Florence Newman Trefethen.

Career and research Following his PhD, Trefethen went on to work at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cornell University, before being appointed to a chair at the University of Oxford and a Fellowship of Balliol College, Oxford.

His publications span a wide range of areas within numerical analysis and applied mathematics, including non-normal eigenvalue problems and applications, spectral methods for differential equations, numerical linear algebra, fluid mechanics, computational complex analysis, and approximation theory. He is perhaps best known for his work on pseudospectra of non-normal matrices and operators. This work covers theoretical aspects as well as numerical algorithms, and applications including fluid mechanics, numerical solution of partial differential equations, numerical linear algebra, shuffling of cards, random matrices, differential equations and lasers. Trefethen is currently an ISI highly cited researcher.

Trefethen has written a number of books on numerical analysis including Numerical Linear Algebra with David Bau, Spectral Methods in MATLAB, Schwarz–Christoffel Mapping with Tobin Driscoll, and Spectra and Pseudospectra: The Behavior of Nonnormal Matrices and Operators with Mark Embree.

(International System of Units)

Books Numerical Linear Algebra (SIAM, 1997) with David Bau Spectral Methods in Matlab (SIAM, 2000) Schwarz-Christoffel Mapping (Cambridge, 2002) with T. A. Driscoll Spectra and Pseudospectra: The Behavior of Nonnormal Matrices and Operators (Princeton, 2005) with Mark Embree Trefethen's Index Cards (World Scientific 2011) Approximation Theory and Approximation Practice (SIAM, 2013 and 2020) Exploring ODEs (SIAM, 2018) with Á. Birkisson and T. A. Driscoll An Applied Mathematician’s Apology (SIAM, 2022)

Awards and honours Trefethen was the first winner of the Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis. In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States. Trefethen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2005, In 2013 Trefethen was awarded the Naylor Prize and lectureship in Applied Mathematics from the London Mathematical Society. He was awarded the George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 2017 and the John von Neumann Prize in 2020 by SIAM.

Personal life Trefethen has one son and one daughter from his first marriage to Anne Elizabeth Trefethen (née Daman). He is currently married to Kate McLoughlin, a professor of English literature at Oxford.