James Wallace Givens, Jr. (December 14, 1910 – March 5, 1993) was a mathematician and a pioneer in computer science.
Born the son of two teachers in Alberene, Virginia (a small town near Charlottesville), he obtained his bachelor's degree from their young alma mater, Lynchburg College in 1928 at the age of 17; his master's degree from the University of Virginia under Ben Zion Linfield in 1931 (after a one-year fellowship at the University of Kentucky); and his doctorate from Princeton University in 1936 under Oswald Veblen.
(Dissertation title: Tensor Coordinates of Linear Spaces.)
In 1963 he was appointed senior scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, where he was later (1964-1970) director of the Division of Applied Mathematics.
Argonne National Laboratory currently offers a named fellowship in his honor.