James H. Davenport

Professor James Davenport
James Davenport in 2001
Born	James Harold Davenport 1953 (age 63–64)
Fields	Cryptography Computer algebra systems
Institutions	University of Cambridge University of Bath
Thesis	On the integration of algebraic functions (1979)
Doctoral advisor	John Peter Fitch Arthur Charles Norman
Doctoral students	John Abbott Daif Al-Kuwari Russell Bradford Emma Cliffe Michael Dewar Nicolas Doye Brian Dupee Andrew Holt Nicholas Howgrave-Graham Paul Libbrecht Nalina Phisanbut Michael Richardson Olga Tabachnikova
Website people.bath.ac.uk/masjhd

James Harold Davenport (born 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.

In 1969, the team that developed the ATM at IBM Hursley (UK) used parts from that project to build an IBM School Computer, as a community outreach project, and it toured the region. When it came to James Davenport’s school, he (at age 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 was testing eight-digit numbers for primality until the teacher’s patience wore out. He worked in a government laboratory for nine months, again writing and using multiword arithmetic, but also using his knowledge of number theory to solve a problem in hashing, which earned him his first published paper at 18. He went to Cambridge University (Bachelor’s in 1974, Master’s in 1978, and PhD in 1980), to IBM Yorktown Heights for a year, back to Cambridge as a Research Fellow, to Grenoble for a year, before going to the relatively new University of Bath “for a couple of years" in 1983.

Davenport is an author of a textbook about computer algebra and of many papers. He has been Project Chair of the European OpenMath Project and its successor Thematic Network, with responsibilities for aligning OpenMath and MathML, producing Content Dictionaries and supervised a Reduce-based OpenMath/MathML translator, and was Treasurer of the European Mathematical Trust. He was Founding Editor-in-Chief of the London Mathematical Society's Journal of Computation and Mathematics.

Davenport is the son of Harold Davenport.