Colin Macdonald
Associate Professor
Greater Oxford Area United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolColin Macdonald is an applied mathematician and Associate Professor at the University of Oxford with 26 years of experience in scientific computing, numerical analysis, and numerical PDEs. He specializes in computation on complex surfaces, high-order discretizations (ENO/WENO, spectral methods), level set and Closest Point methods, and advanced time-stepping schemes including SSP Runge–Kutta and general linear methods. His work spans theory, teaching as a Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College, and practical software contributions to notable open-source projects such as Chebfun and SymPy—where he has fixed subtle numerical bugs and improved robustness for special functions. Colin’s background in both rigorous numerical analysis and hands-on code maintenance makes him adept at turning sophisticated mathematical ideas into reliable, well-tested computational tools.
26 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
BScH, Mathematics, Computer Science, BScH, Mathematics, Computer Science at Acadia UniversityPhD, Numerical Analysis, Applied Mathematics, Scientific Computing, PhD, Numerical Analysis, Applied Mathematics, Scientific Computing at Simon Fraser University
Github Skills (19)
algorithm10
algorithms10
symbolic-computation10
develop10
pytest10
python10
pdf10
matlab10
math10
maths10
f10
numerical-methods10
text-processing10
numerical-computing10
documentation10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
sympy/sympy
Jul 2014 - Nov 2019
A computer algebra system written in pure Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:12 reviews, 364 commits, 133 PRs in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Colin made several contributions focused on improving the numerical methods within the SymPy library, specifically related to handling special functions and mathematical operations such as Bessel functions, Laplace and Mellin transforms, and, notably, the complex behavior of the zeta function. Their work involved fixing bugs related to the evaluation of functions in terms of their arguments with added support for functions such as expint, Heaviside, DiracDelta, and LambertW. Furthermore, they enhanced the library's test coverage to ensure robustness in handling numerical evaluations with special functions.
mathpythonsciencecomputer-algebra-systemalgebra
pymupdf/PyMuPDF
Aug 2020 - Jan 2022
PyMuPDF is a high performance Python library for data extraction, analysis, conversion & manipulation of PDF (and other) documents.
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:2 reviews, 8 commits, 10 PRs in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Colin's contributions primarily focus on improving the documentation for the PyMuPDF library. Their commits include fixing spelling errors, correcting typos, clarifying explanations, and updating examples. The user also addressed formatting issues and updated the documentation to reflect changes in the library, making it more accurate and user-friendly. The contributions span multiple documentation files within the repository.
extractionpythonpdfdata-analysispdf-documents
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