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G E N E H. G O L U B
1932–2007
Elected in 1990
“For contributions in developing and analyzing robust and stable
numerical algorithms used in solving complex engineering problems.”
BY CLEVE MOLER
GENE H. GOLUB, Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer
Science (and, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering), Stanford
University, died on November 16, 2007, at Stanford Hospital.
He was 75 years old.
Golub was born in Chicago on Leap Year’s Day, February
29, 1932, to parents who had emigrated from Latvia and
Ukraine. He attended public schools in Chicago and then, from
1953 through 1959, the University of Illinois, where he received
a B.S. in 1953, M.A. in 1954, and Ph.D. in 1959, all in
mathematics.
After a postdoctoral year at Cambridge and brief stints at
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and Space Technology
Laboratories, he joined the faculty at Stanford University in
1962. In 1965, he was a founding member of Stanford’s
Department of Computer Science, one of the first computer
science departments in the world. He became a full professor
in 1970 and was chairman of the department from 1981 through
1984.
Dr. Golub was elected to the National Academy of
Engineering in 1990 and to the National Academy of Sciences
in 1993, and he received honorary doctorates from about a dozen
universities worldwide. When he became ill, he had to cancel
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82 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
a planned trip to receive an honorary doctorate from the
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich.
Gene’s research and teaching interests were in the field of
numerical analysis, a subject that hardly existed when he
entered the University of Illinois. But as the power and
availability of computers increased, so did interest in numerical
analysis. Today, the subject is at the interface between
mathematics and computer science. In fact, numerical analysts
started many of the world’s computer science departments,
including the one at Stanford. Years later one of Gene’s
colleagues at Stanford remarked, “numerical analysis was the
mother of computer science, but today she is acting like an
anxious grandmother.”
Many universities now have interdisciplinary programs in
“computational science.” In 1988, Gene was the founding
director of one of the first such programs in the world. At
Stanford, the program was called “scientific computing and
computation mathematics.”
Gene’s specialty was computation involving matrices. His
Ph.D. thesis and some of his first research papers were about
iterative methods for solving the types of simultaneous linear
equations that arise in finite-difference methods for partial
differential equations. In the 1950s some experts familiar with
the relaxation methods that were then being done by hand were
skeptical that those methods could ever be automated. But work
by Golub, as well as by David Young and Richard Varga,
provided the first analysis of effective iterative algorithms for
these large linear systems.
In the 1960s, together with colleagues W. Kahan and Christian
Reinsch, Golub developed the first practical algorithm for
computing the matrix singular-value decomposition (SVD),
sometimes called the “Swiss Army knife” of matrix computation
because it is used in such a wide variety of applications. A
search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web page lists
more than a thousand U.S. patents that mention “singular value
decomposition,” all of which were was made possible by
Golub’s algorithm. His California license plate proclaimed that
he was “Prof. SVD.” Golub also contributed to our understanding
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GENE H. GOLUB
of a large class of iterative algorithms for matrix computations,
including the conjugate-gradient method, the Lanczos
algorithm, and Krylov subspace algorithms.
Golub was president of the Society of Industrial and Applied
Mathematics (SIAM) from1985 to 1987 and the founding editor
of two SIAM journals. He also served on the editorial boards
of more than a dozen other journals. In addition, Golub founded
the NA Digest, a weekly electronic newsletter that now has
more than 10,000 subscribers around the world. At Stanford,
he was thesis advisor for more than 30 Ph.D. students, and
through them, he now has more than 140 academic
descendants.
Everything I have said thus far, however, pales in comparison
to Golub’s most important characteristic—his humanity. The
numerical-analysis and scientific-computing community was
his family. The closeness and congeniality of this community
is due, in large part, to his influence. Thousands of people in
dozens of countries knew him simply as “Gene,” and visitors
to Stanford, particularly young people, often stayed in his
home.
He remembered everybody’s name and their children’s
birthdays, and he returned visits, traveling frequently to give
lectures, attend workshops, or just to see people. His friendships,
visits, and e-mails not only led to important algorithms and
research papers, but also made the world a more pleasant
place.
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