Alan Edelman

Bio

Alan Edelman PhD '89 is an applied mathematics professor for the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and AI Laboratories (CSAIL) and leads the MIT Julia Lab. His research includes high-performance computing, numerical computation, linear algebra, random matrix theory, and scientific machine learning. He is also chief scientist at Julia Computing. His computational thinking class has been widely viewed worldwide because of the unique way Julia combines computer science, mathematics, science, and engineering.

In 2004 he founded Interactive Supercomputing, and has consulted for Akamai, IBM, Pixar, and NKK Japan among other corporations. He teamed up with Jeff Bezanson PhD '15, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral B. Shah to create the free and open-source Julia programming language, which solved the long-standing two-language problem in computing. Julia is as easy as Python and as fast as C. Julia is used at MIT, Stanford, BlackRock, US Federal Reserve, Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and many others for solving large-scale scientific problems.

The Julia creators received the 2019 James H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software. In addition, Edelman has also received the Householder Prize, the Chauvenet Prize, and the Charles Babbage Prize. He received the 2019 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award for outstanding breakthroughs in high-performance computing, linear algebra, and computational science and for contributions to the Julia programming language. Edelman is a fellow of ACM, SIAM, AMS, and IEEE.