Celebrating Fifty Years of David M. Young’s Successive Overrelaxation Method

Summary It has been over fifty years since David M. Young’s original work on the successive overrelaxation (SOR) methods. This fundamental method now appears in all textbooks containing an introductory discussion of iterative solution methods. (Most often the SOR method appears after a presentation of Jacobi iteration and Gauss-Seidel iteration and before the conjugate gradient iterative method.) We present a brief survey of some of the research of Professor David M. Young, together with his students and collaborators, on iterative methods for solving large sparse linear algebraic equations. This is not a complete survey but just a sampling of various papers with a focus on some of these publications. Dr. David M. Young’s doctoral thesis [27] was accepted in 1950 by his supervising Professor Garrett Birkhoff of Harvard University and his paper [28] based this work appeared in 1954. This is one of the landmark contributions in modern numerical analysis. The red-black ordering for matrices is of great importance in parallel computing. Gene Golub has said: “It’s almost as if David could see into the future!” David Young celebrated his 80th birthday on October 20, 2003 ( http://www.ma.utexas.edu/CNA/photos.html ).