Thanks to the Manchester NA group for organizing a seminar by David Watkins, one of the foremost experts on matrix eigenvalue algorithms. I find numerical linear algebra talks often too technical, but I could follow David's talk quite well even though I did not get everything, so thanks for that.
David spoke about the standard eigenvalue algorithm, which is normally called the QR-algorithm. He does not like that name because the QR-decomposition is not actually important in practice and he calls it the Francis algorithm (after John Francis, who developed it). It is better to think of the algorithm as an iterative process which reduces the matrix to triangular form in the limit.