Gene H. Golub
Gene Howard Golub (b. February 29, 1932 in Chicago – d. November 16, 2007 in Stanford), Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science (and, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering) at Stanford University, was one of the preeminent numerical analysts of his generation.
Golub's parents were Jews from eastern Europe who had immigrated to the United States. He was educated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, receiving his B.S. (1953), M.A. (1954) and Ph.D. (1959) all in the field of Mathematics. The M.A. degree was more specifically in Mathematical Statistics. His PhD dissertation was entitled "The Use of Chebyshev Matrix Polynomials in the Iterative Solution of Linear Equations Compared to the Method of Successive Overrelaxation" and his thesis adviser was Abraham Taub. He has been at Stanford since 1962 and became a professor there in 1970. He had advised almost thirty doctoral students, many of whom have themselves achieved distinction. Gene Golub was an important figure in numerical analysis and pivotal to creating the NA-Net and the NA-Digest, as well as the International Conference on Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
One of his best-known books is Matrix Computations, 3/e (ISBN 978-0-8018-5414-9), co-authored with Charles F. Van Loan. He was a major contributor to algorithms for matrix decompositions. In particular he published an algorithm together with William Kahan in 1970 that made the computation of the singular value decomposition (SVD) feasible and that is still used today.
Golub was awarded the B. Bolzano Gold Medal for Merits in the Field of Mathematical Sciences and chosen as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1993). He held several honorary degress and was destined to obtain an honorary degree from ETH Zürich on November 17.
Gene Golub succumbed to acute Myeloid Leukemia on the morning of November 16th, 2007 at the Stanford Hospital.