It is with deep regret that the LMS has learned of the death of Professor Nicholas Higham FRS.
Professor Higham was a Royal Society Research Professor and Richardson Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester. He was a research leader in numerical analysis, well known for his work on the accuracy and stability of numerical algorithms. He was an eminent applied mathematician who published more than 100 papers on topics such as rounding error analysis, linear systems, least squares problems, matrix functions and nonlinear matrix equations, condition number estimation, and polynomial eigenvalue problems. He also contributed software to LAPACK and the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) library and wrote numerous M-files included in MATLAB.
He received many honours for his work, including the Alston S. Householder Award VI, 1987 (for best Ph.D. thesis in numerical algebra 1984-1987) and the 1988 Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis. He was awarded three LMS prizes during his career: the Whitehead Prize in 1999, the Frohlich Prize in 2008, and the Naylor Prize and Lectureship in 2019. For the latter, he gave the LMS Naylor Lecture in 2020 – the first of its kind to be held online, owing to the Covid-19 lockdown. He had been an LMS member since 1993.
We send our heartfelt condolences to Nick’s family. A longer obituary will be published in the LMS Newsletter.