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An interview with Charles L. Lawson Conducted by Thomas Haigh On 6 and 7 November, 2004 San Clemente, California Interview conducted by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, as part of grant # DE-FG02-01ER25547 awarded by the US Department of Energy. Transcript and original tapes donated to the Computer History Museum by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics © Computer History Museum Mountain View, California ABSTRACT Charles L. Lawson discusses his professional life and career with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with particular reference to his contributions to the field of mathematical software. Born in 1931, he trained as an optometrist at the University of California, Berkeley. However, after army service Lawson shifted his interests to mathematics, obtaining a M.Sc. (under Peter Henrici) and a Ph.D. (under Theodore Motzkin) from the University of California at Los Angeles. During his studies he worked at the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA using the SWAC and then, following a summer internship, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). From 1960 to 1996, Lawson served as an applied mathematician at JPL, specializing in the production of mathematical software and often working as an internal consultant to assist engineers and scientists with the computational problems. Lawson discusses the work of his Applied Mathematics group in some detail, including the contributions of his colleagues Paul R. Peabody, Richard J. Hanson and Fred T. Krogh. He discusses in some detail the challenges involved in producing ephemeredes needed for spacecraft missions and the state of celestial mechanics during the 1960s. He also recounts the development of computing at JPL, including the organization of computing facilities, the main machines in use, and the challenges posed by the arrival of minicomputers and workstations. Lawson was responsible for mathematical library development within JPL, including the lab’s MATH77 Fortran library. Lawson, Hanson, Krogh, D.R. Kincaid and Jack Dongarra were responsible for the conception, design and implementation of the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) which created a standard, machine- independent application interface to vector routines optimized for specific computer architectures. The BLAS made linear algebra software more efficient, portable and structured. BLAS development was conducted in conjunction with the LINPACK project undertaken by Argonne National Laboratory, and the two projects proved symbiotic. Outside JPL, Lawson was a well known member of the mathematical software community and discusses the general development of this field as well as his personal contributions. Individuals discussed include Cleve Moler, Brian Ford and Gene Golub. In 1968 Lawson became one of seven authors of the book Computer Approximations, one of the standard works on this topic throughout the 1970s. Lawson took part in the early Mathematical Software conferences organized by John Rice during the 1970s and was a charter member of the IFIP 2.5 Working Group on Mathematical Software. Lawson edited the ACM SIGNUM Newsletter from 1972 to 1976, and had previously edited the Scientific Applications Department of the Communications of the ACM. In collaboration with Hanson, Lawson wrote the book Solving Least Squares Problems, which appeared in 1974. Lawson, p. 3 HAIGH: Dr. Lawson has been kind enough to write some quite extensive notes on his life and career and involvement in the field of numerical analysis software in general. In this interview, I’ll frequently be referring to this. We will also try and avoid duplicating precisely the material that has already been documented there. The memoir should be included with the transcript itself. To begin with, I’d to like to ask you to say a little about your family background and early education. LAWSON: As I wrote up here, I was born in the small town of Weiser, Idaho, which is on the Snake River where Idaho and Oregon share a boundary. Population there is about 5,000. It’s been about the same from 1900 to the present. My mother was also born in that small town, and she was an optometrist. My father grew up on a farm in Wilder, Idaho, which is about 60 miles south of Weiser and went to the University of Idaho and then came to Weiser to teach in the high school -- mathematics and business subjects. I went through the schools through my junior year of high school in Weiser, and then for my last year of high school I lived with my aunt in Hollywood, California. I completed my senior year of high school there. I attended the University of California at Berkeley. HAIGH: I’ll cut you off there and ask some follow-ups on that earlier part of your life. Growing up in a small, relatively remote community, do you think there’s anything from that upbringing and experience that has affected the choices that you made later in your career? LAWSON: I guess it’s hard to say. Certainly, in a small community like that, people know each other and care for each other, so there’s a certain feeling of looking out for other people when growing up in a small community like that. Beyond that, I don’t know what I can say. HAIGH: You mentioned that your father taught mathematics as well as business. Do you think that exposed you to mathematical ideas early in your life? LAWSON: I think if there was any influence there, it’s probably more hereditary than practice. Actually, my parents were separated when I was in about the sixth grade, so I didn’t have very much contact with my father beyond that time until I reestablished contact with him when I was an adult. So I probably couldn’t attribute too much math practice, but maybe something in the genes. HAIGH: Did your interests in school as you were growing up focus on mathematics or science? LAWSON: I guess I wouldn’t say science particularly, but I always found mathematics easy and interesting in high school. In the first year of college, I was really impressed with calculus. That seemed like such a wonderful set of ideas and techniques. I did wonder if there was a possibility of a career in mathematics. Looking back on it, I guess I would have to say that I didn’t inquire widely enough to find out what might be possible. Actually, one person I talked to who had been my high school science teacher said, “No, there isn’t anything you can do in mathematics. It’s all been done. It’s all in tables.” So I really did not pursue mathematics. Well, I did take a sophomore year of mathematics, which was not required in the optometry curriculum, just because I was interested in it. But I didn’t pursue it beyond that at that time. Of course, there Lawson, p. 4 wasn’t much in the public press about computers at that time. It was 1948 when I entered the university, so I didn’t know much about that for another year or two. There’s a book that I mentioned in this write up that I read around 1949 that I think really did influence me to think that computers were going to be something important, and maybe I might get involved with them some day. [Edmund C. Berkeley, Giant Brains, or Machines That Think, J. Wiley & Sons, 1949]. HAIGH: You think you would have read that book as an undergraduate student? LAWSON: Yes, I think probably around the time I was a sophomore in college. HAIGH: Do you think it was something that students were reading widely in that period? LAWSON: I doubt it. I don’t know how I came across it, but I don’t remember it being a topic of discussion or anything like that. It’s just something that I somehow picked up and found very interesting. HAIGH: Why was it that you moved to California? LAWSON: In order to prepare better to attend the University of California. I must say that my mother had a rather strong influence on my development in many ways. She had more or less always said to me that it would be good if I prepared to go into optometry; that I could do other things if I wanted to, but unless I decided on something else I wanted to do, she thought I should do everything necessary to prepare for that direction. So as it turned out, I was probably the youngest person that every entered and completed the School of Optometry at the University of California Berkeley. Generally people would not have had all of the prerequisites as young as I had them, because we had had the catalog from the school of optometry from the time I was in junior high school. I’d been taking high school classes and my freshmen and sophomore college classes all with the idea being prepared to go into the College of Optometry. HAIGH: So was Berkeley a school that was particularly known for its optometry program? LAWSON: There were only ten places in the United States that you could study optometry at that time. That may still be true now; I don't know. Only three of those were on the West Coast. One was Forest Grove outside of Portland; one was connected to the University of California Berkeley; and one was the Los Angeles College of Optometry. So I was oriented towards Berkeley. HAIGH: As you pursued optometry, was it a subject that you found interesting and motivating? LAWSON: Not particularly. I wasn’t particularly interested in it, and I guess my mind was always kind of searching for a different direction to go. I remember one incident when we were first doing some clinical work.

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