John G. F. Francis

John G. F. Francis, born in 1934, is an English computer scientist who in 1961 published the QR algorithm for computing the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices, which has been named as one of the ten most important algorithms of the twentieth century; the algorithm was also proposed independently by Vera N. Kublanovskaya of the Soviet Union in the same year. Born in London, he worked for the National Research Development Corporation in 1954, attended Cambridge University in 1955 and 1956 without completing a degree, and returned to the corporation as assistant to Christopher Strachey, when he devised the QR transformation. In 1961 he left to work at Ferranti and then at the University of Sussex, with later positions in industry and consultancies, and his interests encompassed artificial intelligence, computer languages and systems engineering. He was re-contacted by Gene Golub and Frank Uhlig in 2007, opened a mini-symposium marking 50 years of the QR algorithm in Glasgow in June 2009, and was awarded a University of Sussex honorary doctorate in July 2015.