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- Mathematician James Hardy Wilkinson, 1919
- Writer Grazia Deledda, 1871
- Emperor of Mexico Augustín Cosme Damián de Iturbide y Aramburu, 1783
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James Hardy Wilkinson (27 September 1919 – 5 October 1986) was a prominent figure in the field of numerical analysis, a field at the boundary of applied mathematics and computer science particularly useful to physics and engineering.
Born in Strood, England, he attended the Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School in Rochester. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated top of the class.
Taking up war work in 1940, he began working on ballistics but transferred to the National Physical Laboratory in 1946, where he worked with Alan Turing on the ACE computer project.
Later,
Wilkinson's interests took him into the numerical analysis field, where
he discovered many significant algorithms. He
received the Turing Award in
1970 "for his research in numerical analysis to facilitate the use of
the high-speed digital computer, having received special recognition
for his work in computations in linear algebra and 'backward' error analysis."
In the same year, he also gave the John von Neumann Lecture at the Society for
Industrial and Applied Mathematics. The J.H. Wilkinson
Prize for Numerical Software is
named in his honour. He
married Heather Ware in 1945. They had a son.