John R. Rice (computer scientist)


John Rischard Rice is an American mathematician and computer scientist, the W. Brooks Fortune Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and a professor of mathematics at Purdue University. He specializes in numerical computing, founded the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software and is the author of more than 20 books and approximately 300 research articles.

Biography

Rice was born on June 6, 1934 in Tulsa, Oklahoma and grew up in small towns in Oklahoma. As a teenager, his father was assigned to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he lived for three years. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from Oklahoma State University in 1954 and 1956; while studying there, he spent his summers in southern California, working in the aerospace industry. He then moved to the California Institute of Technology, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1959 under the supervision of Arthur Erdélyi; his dissertation concerned approximation theory. After taking a one-year postdoctoral position at the National Bureau of Standards, he became a researcher for General Motors. In 1964 he left GM and joined the recently founded computer science department at Purdue, which he later headed from 1983 to 1996
Rice organized the first Symposium on Mathematical Software at Purdue University in 1970, which produced the recommendation to start a journal for the field. This led to the founding of ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software in 1975, of which Rice would be editor-in-chief until 1993. He was chair of the Computing Research Association from 1991 to 1993.

Research

Rice showed an early interest in computing, publishing a paper titled "Electronic Brains" as a college sophomore. Although his early research was on the mathematics of approximation theory, he spent most of his career working in the analysis of algorithms for solving numerical problems, and particularly on the solution of elliptic partial differential equations.

Books

Rice's Introduction to Computer Science was the "leading textbook of the day" and emphasized general principles of algorithms and data structures rather than specific programming languages, the focus of previous introductory CS texts. It was translated into three other languages.
Rice's other books include:
Rice was named the Brooks Fortune Professor in 1989. In 1994, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his "establishing and seminal contributions to the field of mathematical software". He is also a Fellow of the AAAS and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.