Alan George was born November 9, 1943. He attended the University of
Alberta where he received Bachelor and Master's degrees in 1964 and 1966
respectively. He was an instructor at the University of Alberta for a
year before enrolling in doctoral studies at Stanford University, where
he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1971. After graduation, he
joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Waterloo. He
served as Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics from 1980 to 1986. From
1986 to 1988 he held the position of Distinguished Scientist at the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory and University Professor of Mathematics and
Computer Science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In 1988
Dr. George returned to the University of Waterloo as Vice-President,
Academic & Provost, completing a five-year term on June 30, 1993.
Currently, he is again serving as Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics,
a position to which he was appointed in 1998.
Dr. George's research interests involve large scale scientific
computation and related aspects of mathematical software. He is the
author or coauthor of more than 100 articles and two books, and co-editor
of two other books. With his students, he has developed a widely-used
mathematical software package (SPARSPAK) for solving large sparse
systems of equations and sparse least squares problems. He has been a
consultant to various companies and government agencies in Canada, the
United States, and Britain, and serves or has served on advisory or
governing boards for a number of academic institutions and research
institutes. In 1982 he was awarded the George E. Forsythe Memorial
Prize for Leadership in Numerical Mathematics by the Association for
Computing Machinery. He is a a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical
and Electronics Engineers, a Fellow of the Institute for Mathematics and
its Applications, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Last modified: January 29, 2003