John Todd Award

The John Todd Fellowship is awarded about every three years by the Oberwolfach Foundation and the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach to young excellent mathematicians working in numerical analysis. The Scientific Committee of the Gesellschaft für mathematische Forschung e.V. is involved in selecting the fellows from the nominations. The John Todd Fellowship comes with an award of Euro 1,000.

John Todd Award 2022

The Oberwolfach Foundation awards in cooperation with the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach the John Todd Award 2022 to Michael Lindsey for his outstanding contributions in numerical analysis. The MFO thanks all researchers who have made a prize nomination in 2022. A laudation will appear here, soon.

John Todd Awards 2007 - 2019

	2019 Euan Spence (Bath) Numerical methods and analysis for wave scattering and propagation problems Presentation of Euan Spence
	2016 Christoph Ortner (Warwick) Research on multiscale problems in materials science Presentation of Christoph Ortner
	2013 Markus Bachmayr (Aachen) Research on problems in high spatial dimensions Presentation of Markus Bachmayr
	2010 Daniel Kressner (Zürich) Research on computation of eigenvalues, eigenvectors, and invariant subspaces Presentation of Daniel Kressner
	2007 Annalisa Buffa (Pavia) Research on computational methods for electromagnetic fields

Donation and History of the Fellowship

In 2005 the American citizen Rosemary Lonergan donated 50 000 US dollar to the Oberwolfach Foundation. The donation by Mrs. Lonergan was given in honor of John Todd and his saving of Oberwolfach in 1945. Concerning more information on this part of the early history of our Institute, we recommend the interview with John Todd by Don Albers, published in the College Mathematics Journal Vol. 38, No. 1 (January 2007), p. 2 - 23, reproduced here with kind permission of the Mathematical Association of America, and the article by John Todd "Oberwolfach - 1945" in the proceedings "General inequalities 3" (ed. by E. F. Beckenbach and W. Walter) of the Oberwolfach conference 1981 on general inequalities, Birkhäuser (1983), International series of numerical mathematics Vol. 64, p. 19 - 22, reproduced here with kind permission of Birkhäuser.

Mrs. Lonergan's donation of 50 000 US dollar was partly used to finance the land needed for the library extension in 2006/2007. The other part of the gift is used for the John Todd Fellowship, a triennial prize with an amount of 1000 Euro for young excellent scientists working in numerical analysis, in order to remember John Todds activities at Oberwolfach frequently.

First talk by John Todd in Oberwolfach, August 22nd, 1949

Title: Modern Numerical analysis - the mathematics relevant for high speed automatic digital calculating machines (a.d.c.m.)
Citation from his abstract: As regards a length of the computation, e.g. a day’s output of an a.d.c.m. might be a computation involving 10⁷ multiplications (together with a reasonable number of other operations + - (which take much less time than multiplication)). This means e.g. that inversions of matrices of 150 rows and columns is possible. Errors in computation may be 1) Truncation or 2) Round-off. Study of truncation errors is familiar in analysis ... Round-off errors must be studied in modern numerical analysis. ... Processes must be studied both from the point of view of their length and their stability.