James Wallace Givens, Jr. (December 14, 1910 – March 5, 1993) was amathematician and a pioneer incomputer science. He is the eponym of the well-knownGivens rotations. Born the son of two teachers in Alberene,Virginia (a small town nearCharlottesville), he obtained his bachelor's degree from their youngalma mater,Lynchburg College in 1928 at the age of 17; his master's degree from theUniversity of Virginia under Ben Zion Linfield in 1931 (after a one-year fellowship at theUniversity of Kentucky); and his doctorate fromPrinceton University in 1936 underOswald Veblen. (Dissertation title:Tensor Coordinates of Linear Spaces.)

He was an assistant to Veblen at theInstitute for Advanced Study during his doctoral work, and later a professor at theUniversity of Tennessee inKnoxville, Tennessee. He also taught atWayne State University andNorthwestern University, and worked early on withUNIVAC I at theCourant Institute ofNew York University (NYU) and later withORACLE atOak Ridge (both earlyvacuum tube computers).

In 1963 he was appointed senior scientist at theArgonne National Laboratory nearChicago, where he was later (1964-1970) director of the Division of Applied Mathematics. From 1968 to 1970 he was fourteenth president of theSociety for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 1979 he retired asprofessor emeritus at Northwestern University. Argonne National Laboratory currently offers anamed fellowship in his honor.

• Givens, Wallace (1940)."Factorization and signatures of Lorentz matrices".Bull. Amer. Math. Soc.46 (2):81–85.doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1940-07137-x.MR 0001204.
• Givens, Wallace (1947)."Parametric solutions of linear homogeneous diophantine equations"(PDF).Bull. Amer. Math. Soc.53 (8):780–783.doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1947-08879-0.MR 0021552.
• Givens, Wallace (1952)."Fields of values of a matrix".Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.3 (2):206–209.doi:10.1090/s0002-9939-1952-0047004-9.MR 0047004.

• Givens, Wallace. "Numerical computation of the characteristic values of a real symmetric matrix". Oak Ridge Report Number ORNL 1574 (physics) (1954).
• Givens, Wallace. "Computation of plane unitary rotations transforming a general matrix to triangular form". J. SIAM6(1) (1958), pp. 26–50.doi:10.1137/0106004
• Yood, Charles Nelson. "ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY AND THE EMERGENCE OF COMPUTER AND COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE, 1946-1992 ", Ph.D Thesis, Penn State University, 2005.

• The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s, Transcript Number 14 (PMC14)
• Princeton ObituaryArchived 2007-06-24 at theWayback Machine
• James Wallace Givens, Jr. at theMathematics Genealogy Project

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