Abstracts: Kaj Madsen
John Reid’s influence in informatics and mathematical modelling
In 1973 John spent 3 months at the Technical University of Denmark. He introduced sparse matrix techniques through a course attended by students as well as staff. This course had great influence on our teaching and research in the following years, within numerical analysis as well as in the application fields.
Today sparse matrix techniques are heavily used in informatics and mathematical modelling. I will show examples from my own department ranging from image restoration, speech recognition and medical image analysis to language based techniques for checking computer models.
In 1974 I had the pleasure to work together with John on Fortran subroutines for polynomial zeros. Due to John’s influence the outcome was some (for that time) highly structured programs which were implemented in the Harwell Subroutine Library.