Title
Isaacson, Eugene SIAM oral history
Catalog Number
102746798
Type
Document
Description
Eugene Isaacson spent his entire educational life in New York City: he attended public schools in Brooklyn (where had an outstanding high school math teacher, Edna Kramer), did his undergraduate studies at City College and his graduate work at NYU. In 1949 he completed his doctoral dissertation on the motion of water waves over a sloped beach, which grew out of the interest of J. J. Stoker, Kurt Friedrichs, Fritz John, and Hans Lewy in wave motions and was supported by the Office of Naval Research. His first computing experience came on one of the early UNIVAC I machines purchased by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC); he preceded John Wheeler (and later Edward Teller) as the project chief for this machine. During World War II, Isaacson worked on the Mathematical Tables Project and joined the Courant Institute in 1944, where he spent the rest of his career. Despite an initial interest in point-set topology, Isaacson became interested in and did his most productive work in applied mathematics. He led a team to help the Harvard computing laboratory discover the computational needs for scientific work while it was developing (along with IBM) the Mark 1 computer. Isaacson is perhaps best known to many for the textbook he coauthored with Herb Keller, Analysis of Numerical Methods, and for his time as editor of Mathematics of Computation and the SIAM Journal of Numerical Analysis. He has collaborated with a variety of scholars including Gideon Zwas, Eli Turkel, Zipora Alterman, David Houghton, and Akira Kasahara.
Date
2003-09-10
Contributor
|
Davis, Philip, Interviewer
|
|
Isaacson, Eugene, Interviewee
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Publisher
SIAM and U.S. Department of Energy
Place of Publication
New York, New York, United States
Extent
17 p.
Format
PDF
Copyright Holder
Computer History Museum
Category
Transcription
Subject
Wave motion; UNIVAC; Mathematics Tables Project; Mark I (Computer)
Collection Title
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) oral history collection
Credit
Gift of SIAM and the US Department of Energy
