Forty years ago, Gene M. Amdahl published a landmark paper, and described what has come to be known as “Amdahl’s Law.” This law can be viewed as casting a negative light on the prospects for parallel computation; few applications can achieve linear speedup (in terms of the number of processors), and in most cases, speed improvements are asymptotic. The key insight from Amdahl is that in softwar...

Volker Weispfenning and his group in Passau have had a long interest in computer algebra. In this talk, REDUCE, one of the algebra programs they use, will be discussed. The development of this program began over forty years ago. We shall discuss the design decisions that have influenced its long-term survival, and the way in which the program has evolved with time.

Forty years ago, in early August 1967, the first filovirus ever detected, Marburg virus, made its appearance in Europe, causing severe and often fatal hemorrhagic fever in laboratory workers in Marburg and Frankfurt and, about 4 weeks later, in Belgrade. The etiological agent was isolated and identified by the combined efforts of virologists in Marburg and Hamburg within the very short time of ...

Algorithmic statistics has two different (and almost orthogonal) motivations. From the philosophical point of view, it tries to formalize how the statistics works and why some statistical models are better than others. After this notion of a “good model” is introduced, a natural question arises: it is possible that for some piece of data there is no good model? If yes, how often these bad (non-...

Though I was in the service of the institution f?r only forty years, I have known it all my life. % father began his work there in 1864, and my earliest recollection is going there to an entertainment. I am to try and tell you of the changes in trends and attitudes which I have noticed during my forty years. They are the memories of a " has been ". After qualifying as a medical man, I had five ...

What follows is a very personal account of my professional life and the early years that preceded it. I have described the social and economic conditions in America and how the nineteen twenties and thirties nurtured our scientific future. The description of the early part of post-World War II research covers my experience in the areas of nutritional biochemistry, biochemical genetics and proce...