Title
Rice, John R. SIAM oral history
Catalog Number
102746808
Type
Document
Description
In this interview, John Rice, the W. Brooks Fortune Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, discusses his professional life and academic career. Rice studied at Oklahoma State University, before gaining a PhD from Caltech in mathematics. He interned at North American Aviation working on a computer guided missile project. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Bureau of Standards, he worked for four years in the mathematics department at General Motors, part of its research division. In 1964 he joined the faculty at Purdue, at first serving jointly between the computer science and mathematics departments. Rice served for many years as department chair. The interview focuses particularly on his involvement in the field of mathematical software. Rice convened a series of Mathematical Software meetings during the 1970s, which are widely seen as crucial events in the emergence of a research community in this area. He was active in ACM SIGNUM, and was the driving force behind the creation of ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, a central vehicle for the exchange of code and ideas in this field. He created the ELLPACK family of systems for elliptical problems. ELLPACK was used widely during the 1980s and allowed users to make high level definitions of their problems in a specialized language. It also served as an innovative framework for testing new mathematical algorithms and systematically evaluating their performance. This led him to promote the idea of “problem solving environments” for scientific software. Rice discusses other aspects of his career, including recent work on gas turbine simulation, and identifies some of his key research papers and books. He is the author of numerous edited volumes, of several books on the use of ELLPACK, and of two distinct series of introductory computing textbooks.
Date
2004-03-23; 2004-03-24
Contributor
|
Haigh, Thomas, Interviewer
|
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Rice, John R., Interviewee
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Publisher
SIAM and U.S. Department of Energy
Place of Publication
West Lafayette, Indiana, United States
Extent
78 p.
Format
PDF
Copyright Holder
Computer History Museum
Category
Transcription
Subject
Mathematical software; Nonlinear approximation; SHARE; Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM); ACM SIGNUM Newsletter; ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS); IFIP Working Group 2.5; ELLPACK; Elliptic partial differential equation; NASTRAN; MATLAB (Programming language); IMSL (International Mathematics and Statistics Library); Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG); Problem solving environment (PSE)
Collection Title
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) oral history collection
Credit
Gift of SIAM and the US Department of Energy
