- Stephen Warshall
Infobox Person
name = Stephen Warshall
birth_date = 1935
birth_place =New York City
death_date = death date|2006|12|11|mf=y
death_place =Gloucester, MA Stephen Warshall (
1935 -December 11 ,2006 ) was born inNew York City . During his career Warshall carried out research and development inoperating systems ,compiler design , language design, andoperations research . Warshall died onDecember 11 ,2006 ofcancer at his home inGloucester, MA . He is survived by his wife, Sarah Dunlap, and two children, Andrew D. Warshall and Sophia V. Z. Warshall.Education
Warshall went to
public school inBrooklyn . He graduated from A.B. Davis High School inMount Vernon, New York and attendedHarvard University , receiving abachelor's degree inmathematics in 1956. He never received an advanced degree since at that time no programs were available in his areas of interest. However, he took graduate courses at several different universities and contributed to the development ofcomputer science andsoftware engineering . In the 1971-1972 academic year he lectured onsoftware engineering at French universities.Employment
After graduating from Harvard, Warshall worked at ORO (Operation Research Office), a program set up by Johns Hopkins to do research and development for the
United States Army . In 1958 he left ORO to take a position at a company called Technical Operations, where he helped build a research and development laboratory for military software projects. In 1961 he left Technical Operations to found Massachusetts Computer Associates. Later, this company became part of Applied Data Research (ADR). After the merger, Warshall sat on the board of directors of ADR and managed a variety of projects and organizations. He retired from ADR in 1982 and taught a weekly class inBiblical Hebrew at Temple Ahavat Achim in Gloucester, MA.Warshall's algorithm
There is an interesting anecdote about his proof that the
transitive closure algorithm , now known as Warshall's algorithm, is correct. He and a colleague at Technical Operations bet a bottle ofrum on who first could determine whether thisalgorithm always works. Warshall came up with his proof overnight, winning the bet and therum , which he shared with the loser of the bet. Because Warshall did not like sitting at a desk, he did much of his creative work in unconventional places such as on asailboat in theIndian Ocean or in a Greeklemon orchard .References
*cite book | author=Kenneth H. Rosen | title=Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, 5th Edition. | publisher = Addison Wesley | year=2003 | isbn=0-07-119881-4 (ISE) | id=
* [http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~jacm/References/warshall1962:11.html Journal of the ACM bibliography -- Selected citations of Warshall paper]
* [http://www.legacy.com/BostonGlobe/DeathNotices.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonID=20267091 Stephen Warshall, "Boston Globe", Obituaries, December 13, 2006]
* [http://www.taagloucester.org/jjns.htm Temple Ahavat Achim Celebrates 100 Years on Cape Ann, "Gloucester Jewish Journal", May 7-20, 2004]Further reading
*Stephen Warshall. A theorem on Boolean matrices. " [http://www.acm.org/turing/sigmod/dblp/db/journals/jacm/jacm9.html Journal of the ACM", 9(1):11-12] , January 1962.
*Thomas E. Cheatham, Jr. , Stephen Warshall: Translation of retrieval requests couched in a "semiformal" English-like language. Commun. ACM 5(1): 34-39 (1962)See Also
* Warshall's algorithm
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