Alston Scott Householder
Alston Scott Householder (
Rockford,
Illinois,
USA,
5 May 1904 â€"
Malibu,
California,
USA,
4 July 1993) is an
American mathematician who specialized in
mathematical biology and
numerical analysis, inventor of the
Householder transformation. Married to Belle Householder (d. 1975), children: John, Jackie and remarried 1984 to Heidi Householder, née Vogg.
Householder spent his youth in
Alabama; getting a BA in philosophy from the
Northwestern University of
Evanston, Illinois in 1925, and an MA, also in philosophy, from
Cornell University in 1927. He taught mathematics while preparing for his Phd, which was awarded at the
University of Chicago in 1937. His thesis dealt with the topic of the
calculus of variations.
After receiving his doctorate, Householder concentrated on the field of mathematical biology, working with several other researchers with
Nicolas Rashevsky at the University of Chicago.
In 1946, Householder joined the Mathematics Division of the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he was appointed chair in 1948; it is during this period that his interests shift toward
numerical analysis. In 1969 he left ORNL to become Professor of Mathematics at the
University of Tennessee, where he eventually became chairman. In 1974 he retired to and went to live in Malibu, California.
Householder has contributed in different ways to the organisation of research. He has been president of the
American Mathematical Society, president of
SIAM and of the
Association for Computing Machinery. He was a member of the redactional committees for
Psychometrika,
Numerische Mathematik,
Linear Algebra and Its Applications, and has been editor in chief of the
SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis. He opened up his wide personal bibliography on
numerical algebra in form of a
KWIC index. He also organized the important
Gatlinburg Conferences, which are still held under the name
Householder Symposia.
*
Householder transformation*
Biography in
MacTutor*
Biography by G. W. Stewart
