Mathwar/Personlist/Wilkinson Jim
Jim Wilkinson
(* September 27th 1919 in Strood, England, † October 5th 1986 in Teddington, Englend)
Life
Jim Wilkinson's mother was Kathleen Charlotte Hardy and his father was James William Wilkinson who was in the dairy business. The family were not well off but were close and supported each other. There were five children in the family and Jim was the third child, having one brother and three sisters. Jim showed a great ability to carry out complicated arithmetical calculations as a child, and whats more he enjoyed doing so.
His war work had taken him back to the love of his childhood, namely calculating, and now he wanted to push forward with the development of computational mathematics. He became Turing's assistant at the National Physical Laboratory in London in May 1946.
At the National Physical Laboratory he worked on the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) computer project and, although no computer existed at that time, he wrote subroutines to do floating-point arithmetic.