James H. Davenport

Davenport was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science in September 2019 by the West University of Timişoara, Romania. This was in recognition of his pioneering and ongoing work in computer algebra systems and theory of symbolic computation.

Davenport was (January to June 2017) a Fulbright CyberSecurity Scholar at New York University, and maintained a blog over the same period.

In 2014, Davenport was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy.

He was awarded the Bronze Medal of the University of Helsinki in 2001.

Between school and university, Davenport worked in a government laboratory for nine months, again writing and using multiword arithmetic, but also using number theory to solve a problem in hashing, which was published. He went up to Trinity College, where he graduated B.A. in 1974, M.A in 1978, and Ph.D. in 1980. He was at IBM Yorktown Heights for a year, and returned to Cambridge as a Research Fellow. He went to Grenoble for a year, before taking a post at the University of Bath "for a couple of years" in 1983.

In 1969, the team that developed the automated teller machine in the United Kingdom at IBM Hursley used parts from that project to build an IBM School Computer. It was a community outreach project, and it went on tour. When it came to Marlborough College, Davenport, aged 16, discovered that, although it was ostensibly a six-digit computer, the microcode had access to a 12-digit internal register to do multiply/divide. He therefore used this to implement Draim's algorithm from his father's book, The Higher Arithmetic, and tested eight-digit numbers for primality.

James Harold Davenport (born 15 October 1953) is a British computer scientist who works in computer algebra. Having done his PhD and early research at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, he is the Hebron and Medlock Professor of Information Technology at the University of Bath in Bath, England.