ACADEMIA

Dr. G. Richard Field, Chairman of The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), announced the appointment of a new executive management team for the company following the retirement of two top executives. Dr. Brian Ford, OBE, founder and Director of the company retired effective August 1, 2004 after leading the organization for thirty-four years. Commenting on Dr. Ford’s achievements, Dr Field paid tribute to his outstanding leadership, commitment and foresight. Under Dr Ford’s leadership, NAG had become a highly respected world force in technical and scientific computing. Dr Field also praised the major contributions made to the development of NAG business in Japan by one of the two founding Representative Directors of Nihon NAG, Ms. Haruko Kanjo, who had retired from her position, effective July 1, 2004. Dr Field noted that both Dr. Ford and Ms. Kanjo would continue to be affiliated with NAG companies on an advisory basis. Effective August 1, 2004, Dr. Rob Meyer, President of NAG Inc. in the United States, has been named CEO of the NAG group of companies as well as Director of NAG Ltd. Dr. Steve Hague, Deputy Director of NAG Ltd, has been named COO of NAG Ltd and CTO for the NAG group of companies. Finally, Mr. Hiro Chiba has been appointed as Representative Director of Nihon NAG, effective July 1. Dr. Ford, the retiring Director, wished the new management team every continuing success in developing and further strengthening the NAG brand in the years ahead. The Numerical Algorithms Group is a worldwide, not-for-profit, collaborative, community-based organization that makes, markets, sells, and supports technical software for developers. For more than 30 years, NAG has been dedicated to making cross-platform mathematical, statistical, data mining components, developer tools, and 3D visualization application development environments. It operates worldwide with hubs in Oxford, UK, Chicago (Downers Grove),IL, and Tokyo. Today it serves over 10,000 sites worldwide in finance, engineering, and scientific research as well as commercial hardware and software firms such as AMD, PeopleSoft, IBM, Maplesoft, Manugistics, OriginLab, and many others. In addition, NAG is involved in collaborative relationships with many major research universities through the world. Dr. Rob Meyer joined NAG’s executive team in 1999 to oversee NAG’s North American operations. He holds a D.Sc. degree from Washington University (St. Louis) with a background in applied math, computer science, and transportation systems engineering. Prior to joining NAG, Dr. Meyer held a number of top management positions in diverse industrial and energy related firms. Dr. Steve Hague joined the project that became NAG in 1971 after studying mathematics and computer science at the Universities of Oxford and Leeds. Later he received a DPhil from the University of Oxford in computing science. Since that time, Dr. Hague has had a variety of internal and external roles, in due course being named Deputy Director of NAG Ltd and becoming a member of the NAG Council of Management. In recent years, Dr. Hague has had overall responsibility for NAG’s research and development activities, now being formalized in his role as Chief Technical Officer. Mr. Hiro Chiba joined NAG in 1994 as the Technical Manager of Nihon NAG in Tokyo. Prior to joining NAG, Mr. Chiba worked as a software engineer and later with SGI as a hardware engineer. Mr. Chiba earned a BS degree in Computer Science from Atlantic Union College in Massachusetts.