The following are some of the people who have had an influence on my career.
Ed Frierson was a doctoral student at Kent State University in the early 1960's. As part of his doctoral research he led a weekly seminar of 22 seventh and eighth grader students in my home county, Huron County, Ohio. He encouraged us to read a variety a variety of books. Two that I read impressed me especially. George Gamov's One, Two, Three, . . . , Infinity introduced me to transfinite mathematics and topology, while Bertrand Russell's The ABC's of Relativity was the most difficult book I had ever tried to read up to that time but gave me confidence that I could read and understand complex topics.
http://www.speakersguild.com/education/frierson.html
http://www.rootcom.net/keynote.htm
Jeremy Berstein wrote The Analytical Engine, a book I read while a student at South Central High School. Much of the book is a history of Charles Babbage's work with mechanical computers. Late in the book, however, he described the ferrite cores (iron doughnuts) that comprised computer memory in the 1960s and also presented an introduction to the FORTRAN programming language. I was intrigued by the ideas presented in the book and eager to learn how the ferrite cores and FORTRAN DO loops were related. I took a computer science class as an elective my first semester at Michigan State University in attempt to get my questions answered. That class didn't answer my questions, however, and I kept taking computer classes at MSU and then at UVA and after 5 years finally began to understand the answers!
At freshman orientation at Michigan State University, mathematics professor Carl Ganser noticed a discrepancy between my high SAT scores and low math placement exam score. He asked to meet with me and quickly discovered that I didn't know one small piece of notation. He explained the notation to me and I quickly answered correctly several of the questions I had missed. (Several years later as a substitute teacher I taught that same notation to a class of 5th grade students at Blue Ridge Middle School, in Albemarle County, Virginia.) He then allowed me to take calculus my first term (as a math major was expected to do) rather than take a remedial course.
http://www.mth.msu.edu/People/Faculty/ganser_c.html
At the start of my junior year as a math major at Michigan State University I took my third computer science course. This was an assembly language course taught by Richard Reid. He announced that the first test would be open book and open notes. I studied for the test, but probably not as thoroughly as I would have had the test been closed book. The result was that I failed the test. I was somewhat philosophical about it, but quiety decided that this would be my last computer science course. Somehow Professor Reid saw potential in me, however, and when he had to miss a class meeting later in the semester had me lecture to the class (on GPM or TRAC, I think). That confidence he showed in me inspired me to try harder and I finished the semester with a very low but hard won A and continued taking computer science classes.
Richard Reid retired from Michigan State University in 1999.
http://www.cse.msu.edu/NewsLetters/Fall98/F98PROC4.htm#CPS Department Pioneers Retire
Leroy Kelly was my advisor in the mathematics department at Michigan State. One spring quarter he taught a seminar class consisting of three juniors who were considering graduate school. Each of us had to prepare and present several lectures to the group. One of the others lectured on Ovals of Cassini. My topic was lattice theory. I found the topic very dull until I read about its application to computer logic. Professor Kelly noticed that my lectures came alive at that point and suggested I consider graduate study in computer science rather than mathematics.
Leroy Kelly retired from Michigan State University in 198?.
http://www.mth.msu.edu/People/Faculty/kelly_l.html
In October 1970, during my first semester of graduate study in computer science at the University of Virginia, Martin Gardner's article on John Conway's Game of Life was published in Scientific American. I was intrigued by the concepts and eventually did my doctoral dissertation on cellular automata, a related topic. (I eventually met Dr. Conway in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in February 2000, when we were both plenary speakers at a mathematics conference there.)
http://www.sciam.com/1999/0499issue/0499profile.html
http://users.hol.gr/~xpolakis/jhc.html
Steve Hedetniemi was my doctoral advisor. He encouraged my interest in cellular automata theory and always expressed confidence that I could finish my dissertation. Later when I was a young assistant professor in search of a new research question he introduced me to broadcasting and gossiping, two topics I continue to research.
Steve Hedetniemi received his Ph.D. in computer science under the direction of Frank Harary from the University of Michigan in 1966. He taught at the University of Iowa before moving to the University of Virginia in 1971. He was a visitor at the University of Victoria 1975-1976. He returned to UVA for one semester before becoming department head at the University of Oregon in 1977. He moved to Clemson University in 1979.
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~hedet/
Much of my doctoral dissertation is based on the dissertation and subsequent papers of Alvy Ray Smith III in cellular automata theory.
Harlan Mills, a software engineering researcher at IBM, gave a lecture on structured programing at the University of Virginia in the mid 1970s while I was a student. His talk was the first time I began to understand that just as we can reason about mathematics we can also reason about computer software. Later in April 1990 he said some very encouraging things to me after I made a presentation at a conference. Still later, in 199?, I worked as a consultant for his company Software Engineering Technology.
Dr. Mills died in 1996.
http://www.interesting-people.org/archive/2640.html
Interesting results concerning Dr. Mills from an informal survey to identify prominent figures in software engineering can be found in the FASE issue at http://www.csee.wvu.edu/~vanscoy/people1.htm
Frances L. Van Scoy http://www.cs.wvu.edu/~vanscoy February 28, 2000, modified January 15, 2001.