Steven J. Leon

Steven J. Leon, Chancellor Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, received his PhD in Mathematics from Michigan State University in 1970. During the 1970s he taught in the Mathematics Department at Weber State College, Ogden Utah. In 1979 he joined the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where he served as Associate, Full, and Chancellor Professor. His areas of specialty are linear algebra and computational mathematics. He has been a Visiting Professor at Stanford University, ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), KTH (the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm), UC San Diego, and Brown University.

Professor Leon has also been a consultant for the Lockheed Georgia Company, the Naval Underwater Systems Center (New London, Conn.), and the Air Force Geophysics Lab (Hanscom Air Force Base). He retired from teaching in 2012 and moved to San Diego in 2016. He currently participates in the computational mathematics seminars at UCSD.

Prof. Leon’s book Linear Algebra with Applications was published in 1980. It has become a standard Linear Algebra textbook and has been translated into more than a half dozen languages. The current 10th edition is co-authored by Lisette de Pillis, Harvey Mudd College.

Prof. Leon has been an active member of the International Linear Algebra Society (ILAS). He served as Editor-in-Chief of IMAGE, the Bulletin of the International Linear Algebra Society, from 1989 to 1997 and later as a Contributing Editor. He has been very active in Linear Algebra Education and served on the ILAS Education Committee when it was originally formed in 1988. He later served two 3-year terms as chair of that committee.

In the 1990’s Professor Leon served as Director of the NSF sponsored ATLAST Project (Augmenting the Teaching of Linear Algebra using Software Tools). The project conducted 18 regional faculty workshops during the period from 1992–1997 and has been influential in reforming how Linear Algebra is taught in universities today.