IP over 40+ Years at IBM Scientific Centers and Marketing

Abstract

Time passes indeed! My days at IBM reach back to the late fifties. I was diverted from a career as Physics Professor at CCNY to one at IBM by the attraction of early computing. We worked in several locations not far from IBM head quarters at 590 Madison Avenue. Eventually, IBM formed a “mathematics and applications” group. It did advanced work in many areas, for example there were projects on “reading texts being converted to Braille output (Anne Schack), fabrics being produced on wool looms from patterns fed into computers (Janice Lourie), also “Autopromt”, an automatic machine tool generation project (Sam Matsa), and other such applications never done before on computers. Those were heady days: whatever one did was new and exciting. I wrote some of the first elementary function subroutines of FORTRAN in assembly language, using Chebyshev functions for polynomial approximations, then rational expressions and continued fractions, to assure rapid and accurate computation. Corrections were in binary form, and one might have to fly to Cambridge to get available computer time at MIT! Eventually I headed a small team for developing a first full Package for FORTRAN. It was good to work with the Russian mathematician Dr. Kogbetliantz, a colleague of Hadamard, who was quoted in the yellow Springer Math. Book, Vol. 1 (“Infinite Series”, Knopp). He was a kind old man (probably my age now!) who taught me much about the approximation of functions. We worked in a room in New York City also used by the team who had recently designed and developed FORTRAN, a major task. I became friendly with members of that illustrious group, such as Don Quarles and Harlan Herrick. Later, a first major project was on Global Weather Forecasting, jointly with the U.S.Weather Bureau. We used partial differential equations (suggested to the Weather Bureau first by John von Neumann). I eventually derived them from a general tensor form for a rectangular coordinate system (a paper on it was published in the IBM Research Journal; I believe only a few US Weather Bureau members ever read it). We used a grid with ten-thousand points in a plane and nine vertical layers to represent the Northern Hemisphere. Ingredients of weather (temperature, humidity, wind components)