Numerical Algorithms Group
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The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) is a non-profit software company, whose head office is in Oxford, UK. The group was founded by Brian Ford and others in 1970 as the Nottingham Algorithms Group. NAG specializes in the provision of software for the solution of mathematical, statistical and data mining problems, besides offering visualization software and other services in scientific software development. NAG products are used in a wide range of industries worldwide in order to solve problems in disciplines such as financial analysis, science and engineering and in the fields of education and academic research

Products

The NAG library

The NAG Numerical Libraries are the oldest and best known product of NAG. NAG Algol 60 and Fortran Libraries, Mark 1, were released in October 1971, for specific ICL mainframe series. The first partially vectorized implementation of the NAG Fortran Library (Cray-1) was released in 1983. A C version was launched in 1990, The NAG C Library, Mark 1. Mark 21 of the Fortran Library was released in September 2005 and Mark 8 of the C Library released in November 2005 ¹.

AXIOM

The Axiom computer algebra system, originally developed by IBM, was bought and distributed by NAG from the 1990s until 2001, when commercial exploitation was abandoned and it was open sourced.

IRIS Explorer

IRIS Explorer is visualisation package with a user environment that allows users and application developers to build applications for visualising complex sets of data. It is built on the OpenGL and Open Inventor standards. NAG released version 5.2 on some platforms in 2005 while other platforms remain at version 5.0.

Company structure

NAG has an unusual organisational structure. It was founded by academics from four universities Nottingham, Manchester, Oxford and Birmingham in 1970. That project continued for a number of years and ultimately, was transformed into a UK company in 1976. The libraries had been around for a number of years before that. The intellectual property, which had been contributed from a number of academics and employees of US government laboratories, was contributed to a non-profit company in the UK and a wholly owned subsidiary in the US formed in 1978. Another thing that is distinctive about NAG is that the company has 300 association members. These are people who contributed code to the company or the products over the years. About 75 or 80 of them are employees; however, the rest of them are academics or commercial organisations, all over the world. They have all created code that was in a research state and donated it to NAG. NAG made it more robust and tested it thoroughly, eventually incorporating it into their commercial library.

Management

The current Chief Executive Officer of NAG is Robert W. Meyer. A former engineering student at Washington University in St. Louis, he was the Executive Vice President of U.S. operations for NAG before being promoted to his current post. Dr. Meyer divides his time among NAG's Chicago, Oxford and Tokyo offices and is a resident of Wheaton, Illinois ²

References

External links

• NAG Website
• Interview with Rob Meyer, President of the Numerical Algorithms in the USA
• Three decades of NAG
• Scientific Computing World