Profile
Frank W. J. Olver
Frank W. J. Olver (b. 1924 in Croydon, U.K.) is Professor Emeritus in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology and Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. His degrees of B.Sc., M.Sc., and D.Sc. in mathematics were awarded by the University of London in 1945, 1948, and 1961, respectively. In 1945–1961 he was a founding member of the Mathematics Division at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, U.K.
Olver is the Editor-in-Chief and Mathematics Editor for the DLMF project, and was the author of the chapter on Bessel Functions of Integer Order in the original 1964 National Bureau of Standards Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables.
Olver has published numerous papers on asymptotics, numerical analysis, and special functions, most of which have been reprinted in Selected Papers of F. W. J. Olver, Parts I and II (R. Wong, ed.), World Scientific Series in 20th Century Mathematics, v. 7, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 2000. A conference “Asymptotic and Computational Analysis” was held in 1989 in Winnipeg, Canada, in honor of Olver’s 65th birthday, with Proceedings published by Marcel Dekker in 1990. He has also served on the Editorial Boards of several of the leading journals devoted to mathematical and/or numerical analysis, including founding Managing Editor of the SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis. His well-known book Asymptotics and Special Functions, originally published by Academic Press in 1974, was reprinted in the AKP Classics Series by AK Peters, Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1997.
Olver was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden in 1996, and a Fellow of the U.K. Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in 1974. He has also been a Visiting Fellow, or Professor, at the University of Lancaster, U.K., Imperial College, London University, U.K., Cambridge University, U.K., the Royal Irish Academy, and the National University of Australia.
Olver is author or coauthor of the following DLMF chapters