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Ronald F Boisvert (Fed)

Chief, NIST Applied and Computational Mathematics Division

Ronald Boisvert is the Chief of the Applied & Computational Mathematics Division in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Information Technology Laboratory (ITL). He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University in 1979 and has been at NIST since then. His research interests include numerical solution of partial differential nist-equations, mathematical software, and information services that support computational science. He contributed to the development of the original ELLPACK system for elliptic boundary value problems, the NBS Core Math Library, VFFTPACK (for vectorized FFTs), VFNLIB (for vectorized Bessel functions), the Guide to Available Mathematical Software, and the Matrix Market. He is one of the principal editors for the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (1992-2005), Co-Chair of the Numerics Working Group of the Java Grande Forum (1998-2003), Chair of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.5 on Numerical Software (2000-2012), and Co-Chair of the Publications Board of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (2005-2013). He is a member of the ACM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the IEEE Computer Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  

Current Professional Service:

Current Projects:

Additional Data:

Awards

  • U.S. Department of Commerce Silver Medal for Meritorious Federal Service (1992)
  • Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award (2000)
  • Keene State College Alumni Achievement Award (2002)
  • ACM Distinguished Scientist (2006)
  • IFIP Silver Core (2007)
  • U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement (2011)
  • Outstanding Alumni Award from the Purdue University Department of Computer Science (2012) 
  • Fellow of the Washington Academy of Science (2014)
  • Annual Award in Mathematics and Computer Science, Washington Academy of Science (2014)
  • Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2016)
  • Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (2019)

Selected Publications

Java and Numerical Computing

Author(s)
Ronald F. Boisvert, J Moreira, M Philippsen, Roldan Pozo
We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using Java for numerical computing. We provide examples of current performance levels and propose several

The NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions

Author(s)
Frank W. Olver, Daniel W. Lozier, Ronald Boisvert, Charles W. Clark
The NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions supplies validated reference information in 36 chapters on a wide selection of important mathematical functions

Publications

The NIST Plan for Providing Public Access to Results of Federally Funded Research

Author(s)
Katherine E. Sharpless, Regina L. Avila, Ronald F. Boisvert, A Kirk Dohne, James Fowler, Rachel B. Glenn, Gretchen Greene, Robert Hanisch, Andrea Medina-Smith, Alan Munter, Julie Petrousky, Yuri Ralchenko, Carolyn D. Rowland, James A. St Pierre, Adam Wunderlich, Jon Zhang
In 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo, "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research." In
Created October 9, 2019, Updated July 5, 2023