George Forsythe

Who was George Forsythe?

George Elmer Forsythe was the founder and head of Stanford University's Computer Science Department. George came to Stanford in the Mathematics Department in 1959, and served as professor and chairman of the Computer Science department from 1965 until his death. Forsythe served as the president of the Association for Computing Machinery, and also co-authored four books on computer science and a fifth on meteorology, and edited more than 75 other books on computer science.

His wife, Alexandra I. Forsythe, taught and published in Computer Science as well and actively participated in her husband's work, while promoting a more active role for women than was common at the time. Between 1950 and 1958 both of them programmed using the SWAC at the National Bureau of Standards in Los Angeles and later at UCLA after the western division of NBS was closed due to political pressures.

According to Donald Knuth, Forsythe's greatest contributions were helping to establish computer science as its own academic discipline and starting the field of refereeing and editing algorithms as scholarly work. Professor Forsythe supervised 17 PhD graduates; many of them went into academic careers.