Linocuts by Henk van der Vorst.
Beresford Parlett passed away last Saturday, February 7. He was 93 years old. I have known him since graduate school at Stanford.
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Stanford
Source: George M. Bergman, Berkeley.
Beresford was born in 1932 in London. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oxford in 1955.
Beresford came to graduate school at Stanford in 1958. He had very little money and no place to live. At first, he slept in the math faculty women's lounge and showered in the gymnasium. Fortunately, after two quarters, the math made him a teaching assistant, and he was able to move out of the lounge.
I came to Stanford in 1961, three years after Beresford. We were both students of
George Forsythe, and are both on the
Forsythe tree.
Career
Source: EECS, Berkeley.
Beresford received his Ph.D. in math from Stanford in 1962.
He was a postdoc for two years at NYU's Courant Institute and for one year at the Stevens Institute of Technology
Beresford joined the U. C Berkeley math faculty in 1965 and remained there until his retirement.
Holy Grail
Many researchers, including Parlett, contributed to the search for the
Holy Grail of matrix eigenvalue computation, an algorithm with O(n) time complexity. The quest culminated in the MRRR algorithm, the subject of the
Ph.D. thesis of one of Beresford's students, Inderjit Dhillon.
Beresford's specialities include
- Matrix eigenvalues
- QR algorithm
- Lanczos algorithm
- MRRR algorithm
- Sparse matrices
Nelson Beebe has compiled this
bibliography
Beresford's book,
The Symmetric Eigenvalue Problem, was published in 1980 by Prentice-Hall and reprinted in 1987 by SIAM.
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