James W. Demmel  is the Dr. Richard Carl Dehmel Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the
 University of California, Berkeley .

Professor Demmel is known for his work on LAPACK , a software library for numerical linear algebra and more generally
for research in numerical algorithms combining mathematical rigor with high performance implementation. Prometheus, a 
parallel multigrid finite element  solver written by Demmel, Mark Adams, and Robert Taylor, won the Carl Benz Award at
Supercomputing 1999  and the Gordon Bell Prize for Adams and his coworkers at Supercomputing 2004. He was the 
winner of the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award "for computational science leadership in creating adaptive, innovative, high-
performance linear algebra software". He was an invited speaker in International Congress of Mathematicians in 2002 and
a plenary speaker in International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) in 2003. 

Professor Demmel was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1999, a fellow of the IEEE in 2001,
a fellow of SIAM in 2009, and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2011.