Nick Trefethen, PhD

Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen, FRS is an American mathematician, professor of numerical analysis and head of the Numerical Analysis Group at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.

Nick was born in Boston, Massachusetts and obtained his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1977 and his master’s from Stanford University in 1980. His PhD work was supervised by Joseph E. Oliger and following his PhD, he worked at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cornell University, before being appointed to a chair at the University of Oxford and a Fellowship of Balliol College, Oxford.

His expertise spans a wide range of areas within numerical analysis and applied mathematics, including non-normal eigenvalue problems and applications, spectral methods for differential equations, numerical linear algebra, fluid mechanics, computational complex analysis, and approximation theory. He is perhaps best known for his work on pseudospectra of non-normal matrices and operators and he has written a number of books on numerical analysis. He is also the leader of the MATLAB-based Chebfun software project.