Nicholas J. Higham is Royal Society Research Professor and Richardson Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a SIAM Fellow, an ACM Fellow, and a past president of SIAM. He is the author of four previous SIAM books and a winner of the SIAM George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition. For the last twenty years, Dennis Sherwood has been running The Silver Bullet Machine Manufacturing Company Limited, specializing in creativity and innovation. Previously, he was a consulting partner for Deloitte Haskins & Sells and Coopers & Lybrand, Executive Director at Goldman Sachs, and Managing Director of the UK operations of SRI Consulting. Dennis is the author of many articles and of fourteen books.