Two Volumes of F.W.J. Olver's Selected Papers Published, Lauded
October 2001
The selected papers of Frank Olver, a guest researcher in ITL's
Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division, were recently
republished in a two-volume commemorative collection. The 1074-page
Selected Papers of F.W.J. Olver, Parts I and II, were edited by
Roderick Wong of the City University of Hong Kong and published by
World Scientific Publishing Co. in 2000. The 56 reprinted papers
cover the general areas of asymptotic analysis, special functions,
and numerical analysis, from 1949 through 1999. Olver is
particularly known for his extensive work in the study of the
asymptotic solution of differential equations, that is, the behavior
of solutions as the independent variable, or some parameter, tends to
infinity. Such problems have myriad applications in the physical
sciences.
In a review of the collection in the September 2001 issue of SIAM
Review, a flagship publication of the Society for Industrial and
Applied Mathematics, Jet Wimp of Drexel University had high praise
for the collection and for Olver's work. He said that the papers
"exemplify a redoubtable mathematical talent, the work of a man who
has done more than almost anyone else in the 20th century to bestow
on the discipline of applied mathematics the elegance and rigor that
its earliest practitioners such as Gauss and Laplace would have
wished for it." In a "Personal Tribute" published in volume I of the
collection, Douglas Jones of the University of Dundee credits Olver
as "the man who revolutionized the evaluation of Bessel functions in
the days when calculations were carried out on mechanical, or
occasionally electrical machines." He goes on to praise "the clarity
of Olver's writing, the tremendous precision of his mathematical
reasoning and the brilliance of his technical ability."
Nearly half of the papers reprinted in the two volumes cite an NBS
affiliation. Olver was on the NBS staff full time during 1957-58 and
1961-69. He held a joint appointment with NBS and the Institute for
Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland from
that time until 1986. He is currently Professor Emeritus of the
University of Maryland and a NIST guest researcher.
At NIST, Olver is currently serving as Mathematics Editor of the
Digital Library of Mathematical Functions, an ongoing project to
update, expand, and bring to the Web the classic Handbook of
Mathematical Functions (NBS AMS 55, M. Abramowitz and I. Stegun,
eds., 1964), to which he was an original contributor.
|
