Problem oriented programming languages as they have developed over the last ten years essentially serve two purposes which somewhat crudely can be described by the terms man-man communication and man-machine communication, respectively. As a carrier of information between humans, the problem oriented programming language is designed to express the essence of an algorithm in a way which is un ambiguous and concise as well as independent of (and therefore meaning ful without any reference to) the changing details of computing machine ry. As a carrier of information from man to computer, the language permits the human programmer to express his computational needs in a compact way adapted to the general characteristics of computers, but freed from the burdening details of specific computer facilities. This presupposes the existence of algorithms, or programs, which permit the computer itself to transform efficiently programs written in the problem oriented language into machine programs. Thus the entire computing community profits from the work of the individual programmer. The primary purpose of the Handbook is to present a set of algorithms of broad utility from the domain of numerical mathematics written in the problem oriented language ALGOL 60. Therefore, volumes I a and I b are in a sense supplementary as they serve to introduce this language. Volume I a gives a description of the language proper and of its use for writing correct programs. Thus, volume I a primarily covers the aspect of man-man communication by means of ALGOL 60.

The development of the internationally standardized language ALGOL has made it possible to prepare procedures which can be used without modification whenever a computer with an ALGOL translator is available. Volume Ia in this series gave details of the restricted version of ALGOL which is to be employed throughout the Handbook, and volume Ib described its implementation on a computer. Each of the subsequent volumes will be devoted to a presentation of the basic algorithms in some specific areas of numerical analysis. This is the first such volume and it was feIt that the topic Linear Algebra was a natural choice, since the relevant algorithms are perhaps the most widely used in numerical analysis and have the advantage of forming a weil defined dass. The algorithms described here fall into two main categories, associated with the solution of linear systems and the algebraic eigenvalue problem respectively and each set is preceded by an introductory chapter giving a comparative assessment.

Automatic computing has undergone drastic changes since the pioneering days of the early Fifties, one of the most obvious being that today the majority of computer programs are no longer written in machine code but in some programming language like FORTRAN or ALGOL. However, as desirable as the time-saving achieved in this way may be, still a high proportion of the preparatory work must be attributed to activities such as error estimates, stability investigations and the like, and for these no programming aid whatsoever can be of help. In this respect, ALGOL, as an internationally standardized notation which avoids computer-oriented concepts, provides another advantage, not often mentioned, but one which was already the guiding principle at the very beginning of the programming language venture: indeed, a correct ALGOL program is the abstractum of a computing process for which the necessary analyses have already been performed. It is the very purpose of this Handbook to establish such abstract formulations of certain computing processes. Therefore, numerical methods given in this Hand book in the form of ALGOL procedures may be put to immediate use wherever ALGOL is known and understood; in fact, application of such a method reduces to little more than calling the corresponding procedure."