David Gries


David Gries is an American computer scientist at Cornell University, United States mainly known for his books The Science of Programming and A Logical Approach to Discrete Math.
He was Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs in the Cornell University College of Engineering from 2003–2011. His research interests include programming methodology and related areas such as programming languages, related semantics, and logic. His son, Paul Gries, has been a co-author of an introductory textbook to computer programming using the language Python and is a Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Life

Gries earned a Bachelor of Science from Queens College in 1960. He spent the next two years working as a programmer-mathematician for the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, where he met his wife, Elaine.
He earned a Master of Science in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1963. While at Illinois, Gries worked with Manfred Paul and Ruediger Wiehle to write a full compiler for the language ALGOL for the IBM 7090 mainframe computer. He earned his Dr. rer. nat. in 1966 from the Technical University of Munich, studying under Friedrich L. Bauer and Joseph Stoer.
He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing IFIP Working Group 2.1, which supports and maintains the languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.
Gries was an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1966–1969 and then became an associate professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He spent the next 30 years there, including a stint as chairperson of the computer science department from 1982–1987. He had a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984–1985. He spent 1999–2002 at the University of Georgia in Athens and returned to Cornell in January 2003.
He is author, co-author, or editor of seven textbooks and 75 research papers., he lives in Ithaca, New York.

Works

Awards

Gries is the only recipient of four major educator awards in computer science:
He holds two honorary doctorates:
and is among the first ten Cornell faculty awarded a Cornell Weiss Presidential Fellowship for contributions to undergraduate education.
In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for co-authoring "An Axiomatic Proof Technique for Parallel Programs I".