From moler@mathworks.com Mon Jan 23 08:15:31 1995
From: Jim Varah 
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 1995 14:59:29 UTC-0800
Subject: Two Special Swedish Birthdays

Two Special Swedish Birthdays

by Jim Varah

First, on January 9/10, a conference on least squares computations celebrating Åke Björck's 60th birthday was held in Linköping, very well organized by Lars Eldén and Tommy Elfving, assisted by the staff of their department. About 70 people attended, including many from North America and Central Europe. Invited talks were given by Gene Golub, Iain Duff, Pete Stewart, Sabine van Huffel, Chris Paige, Jim Varah, Charles van Loan, and Michael Saunders. In addition, there were over 20 contributed talks, making it a very full two-day meeting. Particularly notable, in this reviewer's estimation, was Charlie van Loan's talk on the use of Kronecker Products in matrix decompositions, including new applications in wavelet transformations.

A conference dinner in Åke's honor was held on the evening of January 9, at the Frimurare Hotel, in true Swedish style, with the President on Linköping University, Sven Erlander, presiding. Many testimonials to Åke's work and generous nature were given. He was summed up by more than one observer as "a true Swedish gentleman".

Note: several of the papers presented at the conference are available on WWW - use http://math.liu.se/Num/conference/

Second, from January 11-13, a conference honoring Germund Dahlquist's 70th birthday was held at the Royal Institute in Stockholm, ably organized by Lennart Edsberg, Bengt Lindberg, and the staff of NADA. Unlike the event 10 years ago celebrating his 60th birthday, this one was not intended to be a major conference. However, there were still over 70 attendees, many from North America and other parts of Europe (and John Butcher from New Zealand!). Hour-long invited talks were given by Gene Golub, John Butcher, and Heinz Kreiss, and there were as well 25 twenty-minute talks, thus filling up the two and a half day schedule.

Again the conference dinner Thursday night at the Värdshuset on the KTH campus was most entertaining, with 12 testimonials given to the breadth and depth of Germund's contributions to the field, and to his support of other researchers. The evening culminated in the singing of a special "Ode to Germund", written specially for the occasion.

Jim Varah