Alan Edelman

Alan Edelman
Born	June 1963 Brooklyn, New York
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics Computer Science
Institutions	MIT
Alma mater	MIT, Yale University
Thesis	Eigenvalues and Condition Numbers of Random Matrices (1989)
Doctoral advisor	Lloyd N. Trefethen[1]
Doctoral students	Ross Lippert Ioana Dumitriu Brian Sutton Raj Nadakuditi
Known for	Edelman's Law[2] Stochastic Operator[3] Interactive Supercomputing Julia (programming language)
Notable awards	AMS Fellow (2015) SIAM Fellow (2011) Chauvenet Prize (1998)
Website math.mit.edu/~edelman/

Alan Stuart Edelman (born June 1963) is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL) where he leads a group in Applied Computing. In 2004 Professor Edelman founded Interactive Supercomputing, recently acquired by Microsoft.

Education

An alumnus of Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, Edelman received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics from Yale University in 1984, and the Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 1989 under the direction of Lloyd N. Trefethen. Following a year at Thinking Machines Corp and at CERFACS in France, Edelman went to U.C. Berkeley as a Morrey Assistant Professor and Levy Fellow, 1990-93. He joined the MIT faculty in applied mathematics in 1993.

Research

Edelman's research interests include high-performance computing, numerical computation, linear algebra, and stochastic eigenanalysis (random matrix theory).

• In Random Matrix Theory, Edelman is most famous for the Edelman distribution of the smallest singular value of random matrices (also known as the Edelman's law ^[4]), the invention of beta ensembles,^[5] and the introduction of the stochastic operator approach.^[6]
• In High Performance computing, Edelman is known for his work on parallel computing, as the co-founder of interactive supercomputing and an inventor of the Julia (programming language), and for his work on The Future Fast Fourier Transform.

Awards

A Sloan fellow, Edelman received an NSF Faculty Career award in 1995. He has received numerous awards, among them the Gordon Bell Prize and Householder Prize (1990), the Chauvenet Prize (1998),^[7] the Edgerly Science Partnership Award (1999), the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra Prize (2000), and the Lester R. Ford Award,^[8] (2005, with Gilbert Strang). In 2011, Edelman was selected a Fellow of SIAM,^[9] "for his contributions in bringing together mathematics and industry in the areas of numerical linear algebra, random matrix theory, and parallel computing." In 2015, he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society ^[10] "for contributions to random matrix theory, numerical linear algebra, high-performance algorithms, and applications."

References

1. Alan Edelman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
2. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~romanv/slides/2010-ICM/2010-ICM-Roman-Mark.pdf
3. From Random Matrices to Stochastic Operators: http://arxiv.org/pdf/math-ph/0607038v2.pdf
4. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~romanv/slides/2010-ICM/2010-ICM-Roman-Mark.pdf
5. Matrix Model for Beta Ensembles: http://arxiv.org/pdf/math-ph/0206043v1.pdf
6. From Random Matrices to Stochastic Operators: http://arxiv.org/pdf/math-ph/0607038v2.pdf
7. Edelman, Alan; Kostlan, Eric (1995). "How Many Zeros of a Random Polynomial Are Real?". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 32: 1–37. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1995-00571-9.
8. Edelman, Alan; Strang, Gilbert (2004). "Pascal matrices". Amer. Math. Monthly: 361–385.
9. SIAM Fellow Class of 2011: http://fellows.siam.org/index.php?sort=year&value=2011
10. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society