George E. Forsythe

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

George Elmer Forsythe (born January 8, 1917 in State College , Pennsylvania , † April 9, 1972 in Stanford , California ) was an American mathematician and computer scientist who dealt with numerical mathematics .

Forsythe came from a Quaker family. His father Warren Forsythe was a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor , where George Forsythe grew up. He became interested in calculating machines early on and studied mathematics at Swarthmore College from 1933 and at Brown University from 1937 , where he received his doctorate in 1941 under Jakob Davidowitsch Tamarkin ( Riesz summability methods of order r, Cesaro summability of independent random variables ). Another teacher at Brown University was from 1939 William Feller . During the Second World War he researched and worked as a meteorologist, first at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), then at the United States Department of Defense and for the United States Air Force in Asheville . This resulted in the book Dynamic Meteorology with William Gustin and Jörgen Holmboe in 1945 . In 1945 he was with Boeing in Seattle for a year , where he introduced the first punch card computers, and then was with John Holmboe in the Faculty of Meteorology at UCLA. From 1948 he switched to the numerical mathematics department at the National Bureau of Standards in Los Angeles , where he accompanied the development of a computer for weather forecasting ( SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) ). After the dissolution of the institute in 1954, he moved with other colleagues to UCLA. 1955/56 he was at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University and from 1957 professor at Stanford University . There he founded a computer science department in 1961, which in 1965 became an independent faculty with Forsythe as head. He developed it into one of the leading computer science centers in the USA. 1966/67 he was at various universities and data centers in Europe.

George Forsythe died of pancreatic cancer when he was only 55 . He had been married to Alexandra Ilmer, who studied mathematics with him, since 1941, and had a son and a daughter.

Forsythe was editor of the Automatic Computation book series at Prentice-Hall. He also published a bibliography of Russian mathematics books in 1956. Richard P. Brent and Cleve Moler are among his PhD students .

Fonts

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Forsythe, George E.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Forsythe, George Elmer (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH January 8, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH State College , Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH April 9, 1972
Place of death Stanford , California