Abstract
Chebfun is a Matlab-based system for numerical computing with functions as opposed to just numbers. This talk will describe and demonstrate Cheb-fun and also introduce the new extension to two dimensions known as Cheb-fun2, developed by Alex Townsend.
Biography
Professor Nick Trefethen is Professor of Numerical Analysis and Head of the Numerical Analysis Group in the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University. He was educated at Harvard and Stanford University and has held professorial positions at the Courant Institute, MIT, and Cornell. His research spans a number of areas within numeri-cal analysis and applied mathematics, including non-normal eigenvalue problems and ap-plications, spectral methods for differential equations, numerical linear algebra, fluid me-chanics, computational complex analysis, and approximation theory. He is well known as the inventor of pseudospectra for the study of non-normal matrices and operators, and as the inventor of Chebfun.
As an author he is known for his books Numerical Linear Algebra (SIAM, 1997, with David Bau, III), Spectral Methods in MATLAB (SIAM, 2000), Schwarz-Christoffel Mapping (Cambridge U. Press, 2002, with Tobin Driscoll) and Spectra and Pseudospectra: The Be-havior of Nonnormal Matrices and Operators (Princeton, 2005, with Mark Embree); he also won the Catherine Richards Prize for the best article in Mathematics Today. As a teacher he has won awards for graduate-level instruction at MIT, Cornell, and Oxford. An out-growth of one of his graduate courses at Oxford was the 2002 “SIAM 100-Dollar, 100-Digit Challenge”. He has served as the President of SIAM during 2011-2012.
Professor Trefethen has been recognized through many awards and honours. He has been an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians and the Interna-tional Congress of Applied Mathematics, and an honorary Rouse Ball Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He was the first winner of the Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, USA.