(NAG: Oxford, UK) -- The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), a provider of high quality high quality mathematical and statistical software and computing services has announced that it will mark its 40th anniversary by extending the awards that it funds to more institutions across the globe. In the spirit of NAG’s four decades of collaboration with leaders in computing, academia, and industry, NAG will be inviting departments, from institutions across the world, to become involved with the student prizes. Awards will be offered for the best performances in a master of science program, best projects, and best numerical solutions.

The NAG 40th anniversary awards are intended to help nurture the next generation of leaders in science and computing like Google’s Stu Feldman.

“I have fond memories of visiting NAG early in my career, having fascinating discussions about software, numerical, and scientific programming,” says Stuart Feldman, Google vice president of engineering. “The quality and passion of NAG’s people and their drive to make the life of scientists better, and to take advantage of the newest and best results in the math software field was as clear then as it is now. My own involvement originally focused on my interest in Fortran and in my own astrophysics research. This expanded over the years to general interests in arithmetic and algebra. As I moved into other areas of computing, it was very useful to reference the needs of the classic scientific community. I am now at Google, with computational resources of a different sort but also of a magnitude I didn't imagine more than 30 years ago. Yet many of the old problems of reliable computing at scale remain. The NAG, in addition to being a major contributor to important international standards including Fortran 90 and IEEE arithmetic, has perhaps made its biggest contribution by creating a reliable shared base for scientific computing—a basic set of software that could be depended on, that covered the basic needs of much of classic numerical analysis and that improves over time and on an evolving set of platforms,” 

Other NAG funded prizes include The Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software, the NAG Prize in Applied Numerical Computing, and the NAG Prize in Mathematical Finance.

“Nearly every challenge that we face today—global warming, developing energy sources to sustain economic growth worldwide, creating vaccines for the pandemics of today and tomorrow, to name a few—will be solved, in part, with innovative approaches to numerical computing and the most up to date processor platforms,” says Rob Meyer, NAG’s chief executive officer. “Helping with this has been NAG’s mission since our inception, and by extending the NAG Awards we hope to help institutions focus on the development of numerical code with direct application in many fields and to attract the talent that will support the processor technologies of tomorrow.”