Origins
NAG was founded by Brian Ford and others in 1970 as the Nottingham Algorithms Group, a collaborative venture between the universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford, and the Atlas Computer Laboratory (now part of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory). The original aim of the project was the development of a library of numerical and statistical subroutines for the ICL 1906A and 1906S machines which were in use at each of these sites. Code and algorithms for the library were contributed to the project by experts in the project, and elsewhere (for example, some of the linear algebra code was written by Jim Wilkinson, who was an early supporter of the NAG project).
The project attracted the attention of universities with other types of computers and the second release of the library was implemented on new platforms. The project moved from Nottingham to Oxford University in 1973, when its name was changed to The Numerical Algorithms Group. NAG Ltd was founded as a not-for-profit company in 1976, and celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the NAG project in 2010.
Read more about this topic: Numerical Algorithms Group
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