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April 2002
Bobby Schnabel, Lloyd Fosdick, and Clayton Lewis
Former Chair Lloyd Fosdick
was honored with a "Distinguished Engineering
Alumni" award in the "Special" category at the 37th Annual Engineering Awards
Banquet held April 12, 2002. This category honors deserving recipients with
careers outside of the listed categories or who are not graduates of the
College of Engineering and Applied Science.
The award citation reads as follows:
As professor emeritus and founding chair of the Computer Science Department
at CU-Boulder, Lloyd Fosdick has had a formative and continuing influence on
program development in this increasingly important field.
He led the development of CU-Boulder's doctoral program in computer science,
served as principal investigator on the department's first large infrastructure
and research grants, and brought in many top quality faculty who remain in the
department today.
His personal integrity and attention to the value of teaching excellence also
set the tone for the department, colleagues say. In addition, Dr. Fosdick is
responsible for bringing the department into the College of Engineering and
Applied Science where it found more support than in its former home in the
College of Arts and Sciences.
With a doctorate in physics from Purdue University, he began his academic
career as a physics professor at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign in 1957. Shortly afterward, he became a member of that
university's newly formed Department of Computer Science.
"In my first tour at Illinois, I got a demonstration of the ILLIAC
[one of the first high-speed automatic computers], which had just been built
there. It was love at first sight," Dr. Fosdick recalls.
After chairing the committees that designed both the graduate and
undergraduate programs at Illinois, he spent two summers on the CU-Boulder
Campus as part of a partnership with the College of Engineering at Illinois.
At that time, CU had an Institute of Computer Science and offered a master's
degree in computer science, but it had neither a PhD, nor an undergraduate
program.
Dr. Fosdick came to CU in 1970 as chair of computer science and served for
eight years, stepping down in 1978 to rededicate himself to teaching and
research. He again served as chair when called upon from 1985 to 1990.
A dedicated teacher with an international reputation in scientific computing,
he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965 to study at the Max Planck
Institute in Munich and also was named a Fullbright Senior Scholar in 1995.
His research interests include numerical computation, software tools, and
parallel computing. He has publications in all of these areas, as well as some
early papers in computational physics. He also did early, classified work on
using computers coupled to radar systems to track aircraft from shipboard and
wrote software and documentation for the ILLIAC.
Dr. Fosdick lives in Boulder, and his son is a CU graduate. His wife, Erica,
is deceased.
Joel Dice (right), with his father, Chris Dice.
The Department's Outstanding Senior,
Joel Dice,
was honored at the
Engineering Awards Banquet as well. This award honors "students who, because of
their remarkable achievements today, are likely to become tomorrow's leaders."
The award was presented by Interim
Dean Roop Mahajan and faculty member
Bruce Sanders, Joel's advisor.
I've always enjoyed solving interesting problems, or at least trying to
solve them. For that reason, I feel fortunate to live in an age when
technology creates new problems for every one it solves. No technology I
know of illustrates this better than the computer, and my time at CU has
done a great deal to help me to understand the issues at each level of
abstraction in computer science. Each element of my education here, from
learning to program effectively in assembly language to proving theorems
about computational complexity, has given me insight into the difficulties
of creating software, as well as the tools to surmount them.
Clayton Lewis, Chris Dice, Joel Dice, and Bruce Sanders
While my plans for the future are deliberately vague, I know that I'd like
to create software which people can interact with. I'm most attracted to
software tools and games that can be customized and adapted to new uses by
non-programmers. I suspect that, as computers become more ubiquitous, the
number of users who wish to modify their software, whether out of
frustration or curiosity, will grow faster than the number of those who
have the skills to do so. Tools that help bridge the gap between serious
users and programmers will become increasingly important in such a
context, and I'd like to be involved in the development of such software.
-- Joel Dice
Joel is graduating in May as a 5th year senior in Computer Science.
His present GPA is 3.886.
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