Alex Townsend

Essays

18th IMA Leslie Fox prize in Numerical Analysis

A report of the Fox prize 2017 for Math Today.

A book review of "Orthogonal Polynomials in MATLAB: Exercises and Solutions"

Gautschi's new 2016 book is a welcomed book on constructive orthogonal polynomial. My review appeared in SIAM Review.

New Directions in Numerical Computation (co-editor with Toby Driscoll and Endre Süli)

A collection of essays from Jean-Paul Berrut, Bengt Fornberg, Anne Greenbaum, Nick Higham, Randy LeVeque, and Ian Sloan on the future of numerical analysis.

A book review of ''A Graduate Introduction to Numerical Methods'' by Corless and Fillion

Corless and Fillion's 2013 book is a fantastic all-round numerical analysis textbook. My review appeared in SIAM Review as the featured book review. Here is a word cloud blurb of the book.

The race for high order Gauss-Legendre quadrature

Gauss-Legendre quadrature has an interesting 200-year history. In this essay, we briefly survey the old, the new, and the famous. See also my Gauss quadrature page.

Gaussian elimination as an iterative algorithm (with Nick Trefethen)

Gaussian elimination for solving a linear system of equations is the archetypical direct method of numerical linear algebra, as opposed to iterative. In this essay we point out that Gaussian elimination has an iterative side too. It's extremely useful for approximating bivariate functions (see Chebfun2).