The J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software is awarded every four years to honor outstanding contributions in the field of numerical software. The award is named to commemorate the outstanding contributions of

James H. Wilkinson James Hardy Wilkinson FRS (27 September 1919 – 5 October 1986) was a prominent figure in the field of numerical analysis, a field at the boundary of applied mathematics and computer science particularly useful to physics and engineering. Edu ...

in the same field. The prize was established by

Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research national laboratory operated by UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facility is located in Lemont, Illinois, outside of Chicago, and is the lar ...

(ANL), the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), and the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG). They sponsored the award every four years at the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) beginning with the 1991 award. By agreement in 2015 among ANL, NPL, NAG, and SIAM, the prize will be administered by the

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific soci ...

(SIAM) starting with the 2019 award.

Eligibility and selection criteria

Candidates must have worked in the field for at most 12 years after receiving their PhD as of January 1 of the award year. Breaks in continuity are allowed, and the prize committee may make exceptions. The award is given on the basis of: * Clarity of the software implementation and documentation. * Clarity of the paper accompanying the entry. * Portability, reliability, efficiency and usability of the software implementation. * Depth of analysis of the algorithm and the software. * Importance of application addressed by the software. * Quality of the test software

Winners

1991

The first prize in 1991 was awarded to

Linda Petzold Linda Ruth Petzold (born 1954) is a professor of computer science and mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also listed as affiliated faculty in the department of mathematics. Her research concerns d ...

for DASSL, a differential algebraic equation solver. This code is available in the public domain.

1995

The 1995 prize was awarded to Chris Bischof and Alan Carle for ADIFOR 2.0, an

automatic differentiation In mathematics and computer algebra, automatic differentiation (AD), also called algorithmic differentiation, computational differentiation, auto-differentiation, or simply autodiff, is a set of techniques to evaluate the derivative of a function ...

tool for Fortran 77 programs. The code is available for educational and non-profit research.

1999

The 1999 prize was awarded to Matteo Frigo and

Steven G. Johnson Steven Glenn Johnson (born 1973) is an American mathematician known for being a co-creator of the FFTW library for software-based fast Fourier transforms and for his work on photonic crystals. He is professor of Applied Mathematics and Physics at ...

for

FFTW The Fastest Fourier Transform in the West (FFTW) is a software library for computing discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) developed by Matteo Frigo and Steven G. Johnson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. FFTW is one of the fastest free ...

, a C library for computing the

discrete Fourier transform In mathematics, the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) converts a finite sequence of equally-spaced Sampling (signal processing), samples of a function (mathematics), function into a same-length sequence of equally-spaced samples of the discre ...

2003

The 2003 prize was awarded to

Jonathan Shewchuk Jonathan Richard Shewchuk is a Professor in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his B.S. in Physics and Computing Science from Simon Fraser University in 1990, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from ...

for Triangle, a two-dimensional mesh generator and Delaunay Triangulator. It is freely available.

2007

The 2007 prize was awarded to Wolfgang Bangerth, Guido Kanschat, and Ralf Hartmann for deal.II, a software library for computational solution of

partial differential equations In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which imposes relations between the various partial derivatives of a multivariable function. The function is often thought of as an "unknown" to be solved for, similarly to ...

using adaptive finite elements. It is freely available.

2011

Andreas Waechter ( IBM T. J. Watson Research Center) and Carl Laird (

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...

) were awarded the 2011 prize for IPOPT, an object-oriented library for solving large-scale continuous optimization problems. It is freely available.

2015

The 2015 prize was awarded to Patrick Farrell (

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in contin ...

), Simon Funke ( Simula Research Laboratory), David Ham (

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a ...

), and Marie Rognes ( Simula Research Laboratory) for the development of dolfin-adjoint, a package which automatically derives and solves adjoint and tangent linear equations from high-level mathematical specifications of finite element discretisations of

partial differential equation In mathematics, a partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation which imposes relations between the various partial derivatives of a multivariable function. The function is often thought of as an "unknown" to be solved for, similarly to ...

2019

The 2019 prize was awarded to

Jeff Bezanson Jeff Bezanson (born December 26, 1981) is a computer scientist best known for co-creating the Julia programming language with Stefan Karpinski, Alan Edelman and Viral B. Shah in 2012. The language spawned Julia Computing Inc. (since then rena ...

Stefan Karpinski Stefan Karpinski is an American computer scientist known for being a co-creator of the Julia programming language. He is an alumnus of Harvard and works at Julia Computing, which he co-founded with Julia co-creators, Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanso ...

, and Viral B. Shah for their development of the

Julia Julia is usually a feminine given name. It is a Latinate feminine form of the name Julio and Julius. (For further details on etymology, see the Wiktionary entry "Julius".) The given name ''Julia'' had been in use throughout Late Antiquity (e ...

programming language.

2023

The 2023 prize was awarded to Field Van Zee and Devin Matthews for the development of BLIS, a portable open-source software framework for instantiating high-performance BLAS-like dense linear algebra libraries on modern CPUs.

References

External links

Official Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilkinson Prize Computer science awards Awards established in 1991 Awards of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics