ECONOMICS

Cleve Moler was selected this year's winner of the IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award.

Moler was honored "for fundamental contributions to linear algebra, mathematical software, and enabling tools for computational science." He is scheduled to accept the award at the keynote session at SC11 in Seattle, Washington on Tuesday morning, 15 November.

Established in 1992 in memory of high-performance computing pioneer Sidney Fernbach, the award recognizes outstanding contributions in the application of high-performance computers using innovative approaches. The award consists of a certificate and a $2,000 honorarium.

Moler is the chairman and chief mathematician of MathWorks the company that he and Jack Little founded in 1984 to commercialize and develop MATLAB, a high-level technical computing environment.

Moler spent nearly two decades as a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the University of New Mexico. While a mathematics professor and computer science chair at UNM in the 1970s and 1980s, he developed several packages of mathematical software for computational science and engineering.

Before joining MathWorks full-time in 1989, he spent five years with two computer hardware manufacturers, the Intel Hypercube organization and Ardent Computer.

Moler is one of the authors of the LINPACK and EISPACK scientific subroutine libraries, as well as author or co-author of five text books on numerical analysis and computational science. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a past president of SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

James W. Demmel, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, received the 2010 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award for his contributions to high-performance linear algebra software.

Demmel was Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's fourth Fernbach Award winner. The other Berkeley Lab awardees are David Bailey (1993), Phillip Colella (1998), and John Bell (2005). Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello, developers of the Car Parrinello Molecular Dynamics (CPMD) approach, were the 2009 co-recipients of the Fernbach award. Previous Sidney Fernbach Award recipients include Marsha Berger (2004), Jack J. Dongarra (2003), William Gropp (2008), David Keyes (2007), and Edward Seidel (2006).