Among the group of physics honors students huddled in 1957 on a Colorado mountain watching Sputnik bisect the heavens, one young scientist was destined, three short years later, to become a key player in America's own top-secret spy satellite program. One of our era's most prolific mathematicians, Karl Gustafson was given just two weeks to write the first US spy satellite's software. The project would fundamentally alter America's Cold War strategy, and this autobiographical account of a remarkable academic life spent in the top flight tells this fascinating inside story for the first time.
Gustafson takes you from his early pioneering work in computing, through fascinating encounters with Nobel laureates and Fields medalists, to his current observations on mathematics, science and life. He tells of brushes with death, being struck by lightning, and the beautiful women who have been a part of his journey.
Edition
Language
Place of publication
Publishing group
Target group
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 241 mm
Width: 160 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
ISBN-13
978-3-642-22557-4 (9783642225574)
DOI
10.1007/978-3-642-22558-1
Schweitzer Classification
Karl Gustafson is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, USA, where he has been a faculty member for more than 50 years. He is the author of The Crossing of Heaven: Memoirs of a Mathematician (Springer, 2012), and Numerical Range, The Field of Values of Linear Operators and Matrices (Springer, 1997). His areas of expertise include partial differential equations, neural networks, financial engineering, computational fluid dynamics, mathematical physics, and antieigenvalues.
Preface.- 1 The Child in Iowa.- 2 The Boy in Boulder.- 3 The Student in Poverty.- 4 Computers and Espionage.- 5 First Publication.- 6 Into Academia.- 7 The World Opens.- 8 Personas and Personalities.- 9 Wives, Lovers, Friends.- 10 Close Calls.- 11 Mathematics.- 12 High Finance.- 13 The Improbabilities.- 14 Realities.- 15 The Crossing of Heaven.- Appendix.
