Professor James Harold Davenport

Professor James Davenport is a member of both the Mathematical Sciences and Computer Science departments at Bath: when the two split, it was impossible to decide which one he belonged to, and this interdisciplinary theme runs throughout his career. He has taught at Bath for over 30 years, as well as at Grenoble, Paris VI, Ecoles Centrale and Polytechnique in Paris, ETH Zurich, KTH Stockholm, and the West University Timisoara, in Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Numerical Analysis/Computer Science and Informatics departments. At Bath he founded the interdisciplinary natural sciences degree, and one graduate comments: "I thoroughly enjoyed my A-level options and wished to pursue them all further; the Natural Sciences programme provided the ideal setting to do just this. The Masters stream allowed me to develop my interests to a higher level and helped me to discover my future research area." James has led the development, and taught the programming component, of XXI0190 Programming and Discrete Mathematics, an interdisciplinary solution to the perennial problem of teaching programming in a relevant way to Mathematics students. "The programming skills they learnt in first year through Matlab and R helped them in their placement." (Mathematics Placement Officer). He is Director of Studies of the national Doctoral Taught Course Centre in High Performance Computing, teaching necessary skills to research students from a variety of science and engineering backgrounds. A student comments: "I just wanted to follow up on the HPC Autumn Academy, having now had some time to assimilate the huge mass of information we were subjected to over the two weeks! In summary, I think the course was excellent." He has recently taught a ten-week course Teaching GCSE Computing with Python to teachers preparing for the new National Curriculum in Computing. One experienced teacher, though new to teaching Computing, said: "The best thing about the course was gaining fundamental understanding of Python." He is a Vice-President of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, with special responsibility for promoting the BCS Academy of Computing.