Tim Hopkins is a Reader in Numerical Computing in the Computer Science Department at the University of Kent (UK). He obtained his BSc in Mathematics from the University of Southampton in 1971, a Diploma in Computer Science from Cambridge University in 1972 and a PhD in Numerical Computation from the University of Liverpool in 1977.

His research interests lie mainly in the areas of software testing, software metrics, software tools and software quality applied to numerical and scientific code. In the early 1980s he was involved in a project to look at how best to utilise the facilities available on the new breed of windows based workstations. This led to the production of a number of software tools for comparing the contents of files, manipulating the user file system and interactive debugging which extensively utilised the then emerging technologies of a bit mapped display and a mouse!

Tim is Algorithms Editor for ACM's Transactions on Mathematical Software and this, along with his research experience, were put to good practical use in the renovation of the Collected Algorithms from ACM (CALGO). This project has resulted in over 300 mathematical software submissions, published between 1975 and 1999, being updated and corrected. The resulting software package which includes the algorithm codes, driver programs, sample data and results, and other descriptive and indexing material has been made available by the ACM as a CD based Website.

Currently, he is also Director of the UK's National Academic Mirror Service. This service (www.mirror.ac.uk) provides access to a huge quantity of freely available, electronic material including software, textual and numerical data, audio material, and static and moving pictures. This data is obtained by mirroring, on a daily basis, the contents of around 200 academically useful ftp and web based collections from around the world.

Tim has published a goodly number of journal and conference papers. He is also co-author of the book "Numerical Methods in Practice".