Jennifer Scott (mathematician)

Jennifer Ann Scott FIMA (née Dixon, born 1960)^[1][2] is a British mathematician specialising in numerical analysis, sparse matrix computations, and parallel computing. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Reading, where she directs the Centre for the Mathematics of Planet Earth,^[3] and a Group Leader and Individual Merit Research Fellow for the Science and Technology Facilities Council at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.^[4]

Education and career

Scott earned a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1984; her dissertation was A unified analysis of discretisation methods and was supervised by J. Sean McKee.^[4][1][5] She worked as a junior research fellow in St. John's College, Oxford, and then at the National Radiological Protection Board,^[4] becoming a finalist for the Leslie Fox Prize for Numerical Analysis in 1986.^[6] Iain S. Duff recruited her to join the Harwell Laboratory (now part of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) in 1987.^[4][7] She became a professor at Reading in 2016.^[4]

Recognition

Scott is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. She was named a SIAM Fellow in the 2021 class of fellows, "for contributions to sparse matrix algorithms and software".^[8]