William Kahan
William Morton Kahan | |
---|---|
Computer Science | |
Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
Thesis | Gauss–Seidel Methods Of Solving Large Systems Of Linear Equations (1958) |
Doctoral advisor | Byron Alexander Griffith |
Doctoral students | James Demmel Ren-Cang Li |
William "Velvel" Morton Kahan (born June 5, 1933) is a
Biography
Born to a Canadian Jewish family,[2] he attended the University of Toronto, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1954, his master's degree in 1956, and his Ph.D. in 1958, all in the field of mathematics. Kahan is now emeritus professor of mathematics and of electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley.
Kahan was the primary architect behind the
In the 1980s he developed the program "paranoia", a benchmark that tests for a wide range of potential floating-point bugs.
The Davis–Kahan–Weinberger dilation theorem is one of the landmark results in the dilation theory of Hilbert space operators and has found applications in many different areas.[5]
He is an outspoken advocate of better education of the general computing population about floating-point issues and regularly denounces decisions in the design of computers and programming languages that he believes would impair good floating-point computations.[6][7][8]
When Hewlett-Packard (HP) introduced the original HP-35 pocket scientific calculator, its numerical accuracy in evaluating transcendental functions for some arguments was not optimal. HP worked extensively with Kahan to enhance the accuracy of the algorithms, which led to major improvements. This was documented at the time in the Hewlett-Packard Journal.[9][10] He also contributed substantially to the design of the algorithms in the
See also
References
- IEEE. Archived from the original(PDF) on November 24, 2010. Retrieved March 20, 2021.
- ^ a b c d e Haigh, Thomas (1989). "William ("Velvel") Morton Kahan". A. M. Turing Award. Retrieved 2017-05-27.
- ^ Karpinski, Richard (1985), "Paranoia: A floating-point benchmark", Byte Magazine, 10 (2): 223–235
- ^ Kahan, William. "A Logarithm Too Clever by Half". Retrieved 2008-11-14.
- .
- ^ Kahan, William (1 March 1998). "How Java's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere" (PDF). Retrieved 1 March 2021.
- ^ Haigh, Thomas (March 2016). "An interview with William M. Kahan" (PDF). Retrieved 1 March 2021.
- ^ Kahan, William (31 July 2004). "Matlab's Loss is Nobody's Gain" (PDF). Retrieved 1 March 2021.
- ^ Kahan, William M. (December 1979). "Personal Calculator Has Key to Solve Any Equation f(x) = 0" (PDF). Hewlett-Packard Journal. 30 (12): 20–26. Retrieved 2023-06-16.
- ^ Kahan, William M. (August 1980). "Handheld Calculator Evaluates Integrals" (PDF). Hewlett-Packard Journal. 31 (8): 23–32. Retrieved 2023-06-16.
External links
- William Kahan's home page
- An oral history of William Kahan, Revision 1.1, March, 2016
- William Kahan at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- A Conversation with William Kahan, Dr. Dobb's Journal , November 1, 1997
- An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point, February 20, 1998
- IEEE 754 An Interview with William Kahan April, 1998
- Paranoia source code in multiple languages
- Paranoia for modern graphics processing units (GPUs)
- 754-1985 - IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic, 1985, Superseded by IEEE Std 754-2008