Artifact Details

Title

Cody, W.J. SIAM oral history

Catalog Number

102746785

Type

Document

Description

W.J. Cody discusses his career as a mathematical software specialist within Argonne National Laboratory, paying particular attention to his creation of the FUNPACK (and others). Cody graduated from Elmhurst College in Illinois, before spending a year in Korea as a radio operator with the US Air Force during the Korean War. A year after his return to America he entered the University of Oklahoma, where he obtained a Masters degree in Mathematics, eventually transferring to Northwestern from which he earned a PhD. Having previously spent two summer internships working with computers at Los Alamos, he returned to the National Laboratories with a job as an analyst in Argonne’s Applied Mathematics division, where he remained until his retirement in 1991. Cody discusses his work and that of his colleagues, including Joe Cook, Larry Wos, Henry Thatcher and Burt Garbow. He pays particular attention to the development of numerical software libraries at Argonne, in which he played a considerable part both as program librarian and as a developer of mathematical software. He pioneered the testing and certification of special and elementary functions, pursuing this interest within ACM SIGNUM and through collaboration with Hirondo Kuki on the SHARE Numerical Analysis project. This interest was an importance influence on Argonne’s NATS (National Activity to Test Software) project of the early 1970s, which produced the celebrated EISPACK system as well as Cody’s own elementary functions package FUNPACK. He discusses the development, testing, distribution and certification procedures used on this project, and the relationship of Argonne’s mathematical software to users and commercial libraries. Cody subsequently produced the special functions package SPECFUN. In the 1980s he worked on ELEFUNCT, an elementary functions package accompanied by a book and by a routine to automatically detect and exploit machine characteristics called MACHAR. Cody played an important role in the IEEE 754 working group that produced the standard for hardware floating point, and from 1981 to 1987 he chaired a committee producing a radix-independent version of the standard. Cody was also a longtime member of the IFIP 2.5 Working Group devoted to mathematical software.

Date

2004-08-03; 2004-08-04

Contributor

Cody, W.J., Interviewee
Haigh, Thomas, Interviewer

Publisher

SIAM and U.S. Department of Energy

Place of Publication

Glen Ellyn, Illinois, United States

Extent

53 p.

Format

PDF

Copyright Holder

Computer History Museum

Category

Transcription

Subject

Argonne National Laboratory; FUNPACK; SHARE Numerical Analysis project; NATS (National Activity to Test Software) project; Applied mathematics; Los Alamos National Laboratory; Mathematical software; EISPACK

Collection Title

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) oral history collection

Credit

Gift of SIAM and the US Department of Energy

Lot Number

X6673.2013