Abstract :
The Proceedings of the 17th Symposium on Computer Arithmetic are dedicated to William M. Kahan for his lifetime contributions to Computational Mathematics, Numerical Analysis, and Standardization of Computer Arithmetic. William Kahan was born in 1933 in Toronto, Canada. He received a B.S. degree in 1954, M.S. degree in 1956, and Ph.D. in 1958, all from the University of Toronto. He is a professor of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering at University of California at Berkeley. In 1989, he received the ACM Turing Award, in 1994 became an ACM Fellow, and in 2005 was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Engineering. Prof. Kahan is thus best known as architect of the IEEE 754 Binary Floating-Point Standard which defines how most computers today perform arithmetic. His consulting work and his students have propagated his ideas throughout the industry and extended them to areas of test programs, elementary transcendental functions, linear algebra, and programming environments. Although he has been involved in much higher-level research in computational mathematics, he is still an active key contributor to the current IEEE revision effort 754R, started approximately 20 years after the first 754 standard.
