Video Excerpt

IRV
How did you get involved with optimization?

PHIL
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist. For a long time, my principal interest was physics. I grew up in Berkeley, California, and physics was a big thing on the UC Berkeley campus in those days. The people on the hill had a lot of Nobel prizes and were celebrated. That's attractive to any scientist.

But after I graduated from UC Berkeley, looking over my academic career, I was astonished to realize how effortless mathematics was and how I struggled with physics. This helped me decide to go into the mathematical area. My interests were quite broad. I'd heard about computing machinery, and that sounded fascinating.

IRV
How so?

PHIL
In 1948, I visited Los Angeles where they had a replica of the Bush Differential Analyzer. It was a great big machine, about 20 feet by 50 feet, full of shafts and gears and things. You set up the shafts to represent a variable changing in time. The shafts were connected with gears so that you could multiply them by a linear factor.

There was also something called the integrator so that you could integrate the result over time and, in effect, do derivatives. You plugged in large differential equations and it cranked out graphical answers to the equations.

IRV
In essence, an analog computer.

PHIL
Definitely. It was used extensively during World War II and was probably the biggest drain on computing funds until they started with the digital machines. I didn't pursue that very far.

Next