2025 SIAM Block Community Lecture Presented by Dr. Timothy A. Davis

Dr. Timothy A. Davis, professor at Texas A&M University, will deliver the 2025 I. E. Block Community Lecture. He will be presenting at the Third Joint SIAM/CAIMS Annual Meetings (AN25) which will be held July 28-August 1, 2025, in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

During this talk, Dr. Davis will present his work on collecting and visualizing matrices and how he creates artwork from music using the same techniques. His artwork reveals the stunning visual beauty found in matrices, music, and math –  seemingly unrelated topics that collide to produce amazing beauty. Learn more about his research.

At Texas A&M University, Dr. Davis is a professor in the computer science and engineering department; he is also a Master Consultant for MathWorks. His primary scholarly contribution is the creation of widely-used sparse matrix algorithms and software, SuiteSparse. His software is relied upon by a vast array of commercial, government lab, and open-source applications, such as MATLAB (x=A\b when A is sparse), Apple, Julia, Facebook/Meta, Mathematica, Google Street View, Google Photo Tours, Google 3D Earth, Octave, Cadence, Pokémon Go, ASML, and many more. Every Apple device, such as the iPhone and Mac, incorporates his software. He recently developed the reference implementation for GraphBLAS, a library for creating graph algorithms in the language of linear algebra on semirings.

Dr. Davis is a 2013 SIAM Fellow and has been an involved SIAM member for 35 years. He previously served on the SIAM Council (2008-15) and as a Council Representative to the Board (2011-12). Furthermore, he was a member of SIAM’s Industry Committee (2012-16), an associate editor of SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing (2013-18), and a member of the Polya Prize Committee  (2019-21) and the Von Karman Prize Committee (2023-24). Additionally, he was elected a 2014 Association for Computing Machinery Fellow and a 2016 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow. He was honored by Sigma Xi with the 2018 Walston Chubb Award for Innovation and by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences with the 2021 Computing Society Prize for his pioneering work on roundoff-error-free matrix factorization. He currently serves as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software. Learn more about Dr. Davis.

The I. E. Block Community Lecture is given each year at the SIAM Annual Meeting, and is named in honor of I. Edward Block, a co-founder of SIAM and its first managing director. The lecture is free and open to the public to attend in person, aiming to inspire appreciation for the excitement and vitality of science.

Q: Why are you excited to receive this award?

A: Math, music, software, art: it's all beautiful, and it's all connected. This award gives me the opportunity to share those connections with a wider audience.

Q: Could you tell us about the research that won you the award?

A: I've worked on sparse matrix algorithms for over 35 years. I not only create new methods for solving these math problems, but I also implement them in high-quality software libraries for the world to use. This follows an early tradition of high-quality mathematical software started by Jim Wilkinson and continued by many others since then. My connection of mathematical software, music, and art came about as a serendipitous question from the organizers of the London Electronic Arts Festival: "I love your images of sparse matrices; can you create them from music?" My reaction was one of incredulity, yet the result, a few weeks later, was artwork created from music via my mathematical software. It appeared on billboards all over London.

Q: What does your work mean to the public?

A: Mathematical software is a hidden component in every electronic device you encounter, from your phone, laptop, car, the planes you fly in, and more. It enables the efficient creation of goods and services in our economy. Its applications are widespread. From finding the fastest route to your favorite coffee shop, to scanning your body for cancer, to designing the next generation of computer chips; it all requires mathematical software at its core.

My work has contributed to this domain. For example, every time you look around in Google StreetView, you're seeing images taken by the Google StreetView car and then stitched together with my sparse matrix solvers. The same is true for the maps our space program creates of the planets, moons, and asteroids in our solar system. ASML uses my software to create 90% of the world's most advanced chips. My code is inside drones, helping them to find their way. It's on every Apple iPhone and Mac, and in many Android apps, so it's almost certain my code is in your pocket or purse. My software saves lives by sifting through prescriptions for hazardous drug interactions, helps keep our cyberspace secure, and has even rescued young people from sex trafficking via mathematical analysis of the dark web.

Q: What does being a SIAM member mean to you?

A: SIAM is an essential place to network and find collaborations and applications for my work. Much of my work is published in SIAM journals, and some of my software appears in my book, Direct Methods for Sparse Linear Systems, published by SIAM and widely used in many of these applications.

How to Attend

The general public is encouraged to attend Dr. Davis’ presentation in person. The date, time, and other talk details will be added here when the program becomes available. For those unable to join us in Montréal, SIAM will upload the talk on YouTube following the event. Learn more about AN25.

Block lectures are intended to reach out as broadly as possible to students, teachers, and members of the local community, as well as to SIAM members, researchers, and practitioners in fields related to applied and computational mathematics. Ideas for future presenters? Suggest them here.