Gilbert Strang

Strang was born in Chicago in 1934 to Scottish immigrant parents; he grew up in Washington and in Cincinnati, Ohio, and attended the Principia School in St. Louis.⁠[1]

He earned an S.B. from MIT in 1955, a B.A. and M.A. from Oxford UniversityUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry as a Rhodes Scholar in 1957, and a Ph.D. from UCLA as an NSF Fellow in 1959.⁠[2]

He was a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at MIT in 1959–1961 and a NATO postdoctoral fellow at Oxford in 1961–1962; he became an MIT assistant professor in 1962, associate professor in 1964 and professor in 1970.⁠[2]

In 1973 An Analysis of the Finite Element Method, written with George Fix, was published by Prentice-Hall; the book was later issued by Wellesley-Cambridge Press.⁠[3]

That year he published the paper “Piecewise polynomials and the finite element method” in volume 79 of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.⁠[4]

The paper received the Chauvenet Prize of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).⁠[5]

In 1996 Wavelets and Filter Banks, written with Truong Nguyen of the University of Wisconsin, was published by Wellesley-Cambridge Press; it explains how a wavelet is determined by a choice of filter coefficients and analyses MATLAB applications.⁠[6]

He served as president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 1999 and 2000 and chaired the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics.⁠[7]

In 2001 his 18.06 Linear Algebra course was posted on MIT OpenCourseWare, where it gained millions of views worldwide.⁠[8]

In September 2006 MIT announced that the MAA’s Northeastern Section had named him its 2006 Distinguished University Teacher of Mathematics and that he would receive the national Haimo teaching award and the first Su Buchin Prize of the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM); he had already received the 2005 von Neumann Prize Medal for his work on the finite element method.⁠[9]

The MAA’s list of Haimo Award recipients names him among the 2007 winners; the award honours college and university mathematics teachers whose influence extends beyond their own institutions.⁠[10]

On April 28, 2009, he and five other MIT scholars were elected to the National Academy of Sciences.⁠[11]

In September 2011 MIT’s Department of Mathematics announced him as the first holder of the MathWorks Professorship of Mathematics, a chair funded by MathWorks, the developer of MATLAB.⁠[12]

In spring 2018 he taught MIT course 18.065, “Matrix Methods in Data Analysis, Signal Processing, and Machine Learning”; its textbook, Linear Algebra and Learning from Data, was published by Wellesley-Cambridge Press in 2019.⁠[13]

Reviewer Daniel D. Gutierrez found the book a fine addition to a data scientist’s library but noted that it is dense, not for novices and has no bibliography.⁠[14]

On November 25, 2019, he appeared as the guest of episode 52 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing MIT OpenCourseWare, the four fundamental subspaces of linear algebra, singular value decomposition, deep learning and advice for mathematics students.⁠[15]

In December 2019 he was elected a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in its section of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science.⁠[16]

In 2020 he received MIT’s Irwin Sizer Prize.⁠[7]

In 2023 the sixth edition of his textbook Introduction to Linear Algebra appeared; it is distributed outside North America by Cambridge University Press and is also sold by SIAM and the American Mathematical Society.⁠[17]

On May 15, 2023, he taught his last class, ending a 66-year career at MIT.⁠[8]

More than 6,000 people watched this final 18.06 lecture online and the video passed 352,000 views within a week; the course drew a record 460 students that semester.⁠[1]

Since July 2023 he has been Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at MIT (MathWorks Professor Emeritus); he is also the founder of Wellesley-Cambridge Press and serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals.⁠[16]

He and his wife, Jillian, have three sons and 10 grandchildren.⁠[1]

Personal website: Public link: https://math.mit.edu/~gs/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

MIT: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]