Fox's Wider Influence
While Fox influenced the development of numerical analysis through his undergraduate teaching and postgraduate supervision (he supervised around 19 doctoral students), industrial collaboration he also made significant contributions to course material for the Open University. He lectured widely on 'meaningless answers', describing some of the pitfalls of numerical computation from the uncritical use of simple methods
Fox played a signifficant part in the early days of the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), which set out as a collaborative venture between Oxford, Nottingham and Manchester to provide a reliable and well-tested mathematical subroutine library. The Oxford Computing Laboratory was one of the founder members of NAG when it started in 1970, and Fox supported it strongly and he became a member of its council when the Group was incorporated in 1976 continuing in this capacity until 1984.
Fox was an active member of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications from its beginnings, as a member of the Council and as an editor first of the main 'IMA Journal and later the specialised Journal of Numerical Analysis, started in 1981. The IMA marked his retirement from Oxford in 1983 by a special IMA symposium on 'The contributions of Leslie Fox to numerical analysis'.
His interests extended to mathematics in schools and he participated the development of the School Mathematics Project, and was active in the local branch of the Mathematical Association, of which he was President in 1964. The first winner of the IMA's Leslie Fox prize for Numerical Analysis in 1985, Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen, went on to be appointed to the chair in Numerical Analysis at Oxford that was created for Leslie Fox in 1963.
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