Forsythe came to Stanford in the Mathematics Department in 1959, and served as professor and chairman of the Computer Science department from 1965 until his death.[2] He served as the president of the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), coauthored four books on
computer science and a fifth on
meteorology, and edited more than 75 other books on computer science.
Early life
George Elmer Forsythe was born on January 8, 1917, in
State College, Pennsylvania. Forsythe's family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan when George was a young boy. Forsythe became interested in computing at a young age, experimenting with
hand-cranked desk calculators.
Forsythe earned a Bachelor of Science in mathematics at
Swarthmore College in 1937, where he was awarded a scholarship. He completed a Ph.D. in mathematics at
Brown University in 1941 under the direction of
Jacob David Tamarkin. After receiving his doctorate, Forsythe went to Stanford University to work as an instructor in mathematics. His teaching career was interrupted by service in the
U.S. Air Force and a stint at
Boeing.[3]
Professional life
Forsythe married
Alexandra I. Forsythe, who wrote the first published textbook in computer science[4] and actively participated in her husband's work, while promoting a more active role for women than was common at the time.[5] Between 1950 and 1958 both of them programmed using the
SWAC at the
National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Los Angeles and later at
UCLA after the western division of NBS was closed due to political pressures (see Oral History cited below). With his wife, Forsythe had a daughter and a son.
According to
Donald Knuth, Forsythe's greatest contributions were helping to establish
computer science as its own academic discipline and starting the field of refereeing and editing
algorithms as scholarly work.[6] Professor Forsythe supervised 17 PhD graduates; many of them went into academic careers.[7] He won a
Lester R. Ford Award in 1969[8] and again in 1971.[9]
Bibliography of Russian Mathematics Books, Chelsea, New York, 1956, 106 pp.[11]
Numerical analysis and partial differential equations. Contemporary state of numerical analysis, Wiley 1958 (with
Paul C. Rosenbloom: Linear partial equations)[12]
Finite Difference Methods for Partial Differential Equations (with Wolfgang Wasow), John Wiley, New York, 1966, 444 pp.
Computer Solution of Linear Algebraic Systems (with
Cleve B. Moler),
Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1967, 153 pp.
Computer methods for mathematical computations (with Michael A. Malcolm and Cleve B. Moler), Prentice-Hall Series in Automatic Computation, Prentice-Hall., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1977.
MR0458783ISBN0-13-165332-6 This book about numerical methods was partly finished when Forsythe died.
Knuth's 1972 CACM article[6] lists all of Forsythe's published works.
^Heard, J. F. (1945). "Review of Dynamic Meteorology by Jørgen Holmboe, George Forsythe, and William Gustin". Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. 39: 375.
Bibcode:
1945JRASC..39..375H.