NEWS FROM FORMER ROSS PARTICIPANTS - 2008-9

After attending the Ross Program at Notre Dame in the summer of 1961 (after my sophomore year in high school), I attended another NSF SSTP at Oregon State the following year. In that program we did a wider variety of topics than in the Ross program, including Fortran programming and switching theory. I got hooked on computers then and made them my life's work. I got an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology (1967) and a doctorate in computer science from Cornell University (1971). I was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1970-2000, retiring as a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science in December 2000 and moved to the Department of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology as professor and chair, an administrative post I held until 2006.

My research interests are in theoretical computer science--especially the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures. I was made a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1995, I have authored or coauthored more than 70 research papers and 10 books; my papers on backtrack search, generation of combinations, weight-balanced binary trees, and drawing of trees and graphs are now considered classics. In the early 1980s I devised and implemented the calendar/diary part of GNU Emacs, maintaining it for many
years. That work led to an intense interest in calendars and their computer implementation, resulting several scholarly papers and books.

I live in Skokie, Illinois with my wife Ruth (nee Nothmann) of over 40 years. We have four daughters (all on the East Coast) and nine grandchildren.