Forty Years of Preconditioning

The 9th International Conference on Preconditioning Techniques for Scientific and Industrial applications was held at Eindhoven University of Technology in June. About 100 participants and eight invited speakers shared ideas and had lively discussions on a wide variety of topics. Information about the lectures and invited speakers, as well as some downloadable presentations are available on the conference website. 

An evening lecture by Koos Meijerink and Henk van der Vorst about “40 years of preconditioning” at the Van Abbemuseum of modern art was a special feature, marking the speakers’ seminal paper about Incomplete Choleski Conjugate Gradient published in 1977 in Mathematics of Computation, the results having been available already around 1975. The location was chosen to reflect art, van der Vorst's current interest.