Randolph-Macon College Mathematics Professor Brian Sutton is the author of Numerical Analysis: Theory and Experiments (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 2019). Numerical analysis is the study of algorithms for solving mathematical problems that arise in science and engineering.

Readers of the book learn to design mathematical methods, implement them in computer code, and analyze their effectiveness using a combination of mathematical theory and computer experimentation.

Sutton says the inspiration for writing the book began in 2008, when he attended the Householder Symposium in Zeuthen, Germany.

“I attended a presentation by Nick Trefethen, Professor of Numerical Analysis at Oxford University,” explains Sutton. “He demonstrated a series of methods named after Pafnuty Chebyshev, a Russian mathematician who lived in the mid-1800s, that were not widely used in practice even though their theoretical basis had been known for over a century. The results were stunning. I immediately reworked my Numerical Analysis course to present these ideas to students encountering numerical analysis for the first time. This book shares my approach with the wider community.”

Brian Sutton
Sutton joined the faculty at Randolph-Macon College in 2005. He earned bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer science at Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research and other writings have been published in academic and instructional publications.

In 2009 Sutton received a $107,951 grant from the National Science Foundation. The funding supported his research project, titled Stable and efficient computation of the CS decomposition. In 2009 Sutton was also awarded the 14th Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis.

Sutton served for six years as associate editor for SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications.