And Cleve Moler?

Another stalwart gone.  The founder and long-time leader of MatLab, Cleve Moler, just passed.   https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-cleve-moler-1939-2026/

 I first met Cleve when he was a sophomore at Caltech--I think Pete Rux introduced us, but I am not sure about that.   Actually, now that I think about it, it probably was my old high school idol, Karl Pool.

Cleve was one of those 'big men on campus' types, rooming at Ricketts House with an even bigger personality, Brad Efron.  Cleve (pronounced and named for his grandfather who was named Cleveland for the Ohio town) oozed personality, charisma, and in addition, he was obsessed with mathematics.  Brad was, too, but made his way into statistics where his fame now resides.

Cleve's goal was to make mathematics 'available' to the lay public, which explains how he came to create MatLab.  Heres the one sentence about MatLab that I find so wonderful:  MATLAB, the language of engineers and scientists, is a programming and numerical computation environment for algorithm development, data analysis, and visualization.  

Now I grant you that not every person walking up and down the sidewalk in Sacramento (or any other town in America) would be apt to describe such a sentence as truy math 'avaiable' to the lay public, but that is how Cleve saw it.

Searching old records, I found a Caltech newspaper from March 5, 1959 which listed the Ricketts House candidates for office in my sophomore year.  And sure enough, Brad was running for president, and Karl was running for Athletics Director.  Cleve was watching Brad tear up the landscape   https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/477/1/1959_03_05_60_20.pdf

I caught up with Cleve in January 2024, for an ACM Archive interview about his career.  It was a solid interview, akin to the one that Thomas Haigh had done twenty years prior for SIAM.   https://history.siam.org/oralhistories/moler.htm.   Tom's was the classic historian interview of a techie; mine was more of a Who and Why as seen from a colleague, characteristic of the 175 interviews I've done for ACM.   Each has value, while providing some different insights.   I have an unedited transcript and Video on request, but they seem unable to attach here (cockpit error, early Sunday morning).

The surprise for me was that Cleve was a Salt Lake City kid, and so were a number of classmates, including Roger Noll and our Nobelist, Kip Thorne.   Cleve played high school basketball with Roger; Roger and Kip were both in my class, and we had some sport talking about our various career paths. Remarkably, Cleve did not know Al Despain, also in my class, who went on at Berkeley to pioneer Chess Games with Dave Patterson, and later founding AcornTechnologies (not to be confused with the British Acorn Computers).   

My first wife was born and raised in Salt Lake City, and my long-time Forest Service partner, Irv McQuarrie led me to his cousin who co-founded Beehive Medical Electronics, with Homer Warner.  Alan Kay's first job while attending U of Utah was at Beehive, where he used my HP1300A XY display for his pioneering PC, the FlexMachine.   Ivan Sutherland was still at NSF, five months from joining the U of Utah to help establish their fabled Graphics program.   Somehow (lament, lament), the HP 1300A never gets mentioned as the first interactive dynamic display that was used at U of Utah's program.  Ah, well.   

Cleve 'found' Jack Dongarra, an intern at Argonne, and persuaded him to join Cleve in a new PhD program at the University of New Mexico.   Jack, later a storied ACM Turing winner, gives Cleve full credit and then some for his keen eye and key leadership for Jack's nascent career.

We've lost another good one, at a mere 86 years.  Au revoir, Cleve.

These damned obituaries

 Damn, damn, damn: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/technology/peter-g-neumann-dead.html    John Markoff wrote a beautiful eulogy for the New York Times obituary, for an incredible man, Peter Neumann.

This one was a bit of a surprise (somehow, maybe they all are, even though we know that age catches us all)..  In this case, we anticipated that a wonderful colleague, Peter Neumann, would be speaking once again at the fabled Asilomar Microprocessor Workshop, now just completed its 52rd year.  https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/events/asilomar-microcomputer-workshop

Peter has been the author of the ACM RISKS column for well-nigh 40 years, uncovering all sorts of issues with dangerous software (including years ago the infamous DC-8 failures), and he got away with all of this while working at SRI throughout.  

He was scheduled to give a talk again at Asilomar last month, but illness prevented that, so his talk was given by a colleague, Robert Watson, from Oxford.   This morning, I got this full note from Brian Berg, the redoubtable long-term chairman for Asilomar Micro:

Hello, all,

Many of you attended AMW 52 earlier this month.  The plan included an in-person talk by SRI's Peter Neumann, but he was hospitalized due to an injury at the time of the workshop.  His talk was ultimately given by an Oxford University professor with whom he and others at SRI had collaborated for many years on a security project titled CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions).

AMW attendees - both in-person at Asilomar (like myself) and over Zoom (including Peter, while he was lying flat on his hospital bed) - heard Peter's talk on Thu, May 7, which was given via Zoom from Oxford, UK by Professor Robert N. M. Watson!  The talk - titled Trustworthiness: Reflections on My 73 Years of R&D - summed up Peter Neumann's career at SRI International's Computer Science Lab, and he provided this humble talk abstract: "I have been involved in three clean-slate hardware-software development efforts. Some of that is worth re-examining."

Peter also provided this nice bio:

Peter G. Neumann has been a computer professional since 1953, including 10 years at Bell Labs in Murray Hill in the 1960s. He is in his 55th year at not-for-profit SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute). After being a Fulbright Scholar for 2 years in Darmstadt, he taught courses at Stanford, Berkeley, and Maryland, and then wound up with doctorates in both 1960 and 1961. He was in four National Academies study groups, and is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.

Peter's two previous AMW talks were:

• 2001: Voting is an End-to-End System Problem!
• 2013: Rethinking High-Assurance Security from the Ground Up

Ten days later - on Sun, May 20 - Peter sadly departed this planet.  ACM published an obituary here, and the NY Times obituary is attached.

Memorial Service

A memorial service will be held on Sat, 13 June, 10am-Noon PDT at the SRI Innovation Center in Menlo Park, CA. You can register for in-person and online attendance here.  Peter's daughter Helen asked that information about this event be circulated to his friends and colleagues, and she notes that she doesn't have access to Peter's emails or address book.

Thank you, and thanks to Rebecca Mercuri who first provided me information about the memorial service.

Brian Berg

Vojak and COVID

Bruce Vojak and I met, really for the first time, last week via Zoom.    Odd, when you 'know' someone, and even more odd, when they 'know' you, to find out that you've met only once, and that for only five minutest sixteen years ago.   What does it mean, to 'know'?

Bruce 'knew' me via his colleague and partner Ray Price when they were working on their Serial Innovators book (Stanford Press, 2012,  https://www.amazon.com/Serial-Innovators-Individuals-Breakthrough-Innovations/dp/0804775974).   I had been to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) in January 2010 to co-deliver a talk about Ray's and my Stanford 2009 book about Hewlett-Packard (The HP Phenomenon:  Innovation and Business Transformation)       https://www.amazon.com/HP-Phenomenon-Innovation-Business-Transformation/dp/0804752869

Both books, I am happy to report, continue to sell (admittedly in smaller quantities these days), even though the HP we reported on has since endured some choppy waters. 

Vojak attended our lecture, and Ray introduced him at the end, briefly, as a colleague rather than a co-author--the meeting was not memorable at the time.   Ray and Bruce had yet another colleague, Abbie Griffin, who had by this time left UIUC for a role at U of Utah, whom I did not meet.   

Well, Zoom is a wonderful mechanism to get to know someone.  Bruce on May 7th this year had just completed the first (of three) interviews with Aidan McCullen (described elsewhere in this post, and also in my Intrapreneuring Post   (https://intrapreneuringinnovation.blogspot.com/)   We scheduled a half-hour, that stretched easily to an hour and a half.  The book that the three wrote had a number of different stories about my career (more by far than I recalled were included in the book), and we visited about his writing experience there and in subsequent consulting gigs.   The book itself took them twelve years; indeed, they never intended to write a book, but the collected interviews of some twenty people were compelling enough that the book emerged, almost naturally.

But you cannot talk for an hour and a half without covering what has happened for each of us in the intervening sixteen years.  And that was the excitement, I think, for each of us.   We talked at length about 'the interview process' and our mutual findings about how they work, what it takes to get someone candid enough to share true goals, insights and key accomplishments without the braggadocio that ruins so many stories due to hagiography.

And then we talked about COVID, and in particular, the work that I've done on that topic over the past six years.   Bruce knew of the COPD work I'd done long ago, but not the recent work in that arena (see my COPD blog  https://breathecopd.blogspot.com/ ).  I also shared the lecture I had just delivered for the Innovation Value Institute in Ireland (at the Maynooth University, one of the four National Universities in Ireland).

And here is where an 'old friend'--one you've basically never met, but who 'knows' you--comes in.  The Zoom summary itself is insightful: The core of the discussion was Charles's development of advanced data visualization and analysis tools for COVID-19, including dynamic dashboards and compendiums that aggregate and interpret pandemic data at granular levels, such as county and province, using both traditional and AI-driven methods. He highlighted the challenges of data collection, inconsistencies in global reporting, and the political and emotional barriers to effective data use, as well as the lack of comprehensive public analysis of COVID-19 data. Charles shared his efforts to publish a prototype book and make the data accessible, but noted obstacles in distribution due to controversial topics like vaccination.

In a subsequent note, Bruce shared the following: I'm suggesting something of a lessons learned presentation of the data, laid out in a non-political, non-aligned way, with the message, "Isn't this interesting? What might we learn from this?" I think you're already doing this, but perhaps I'm suggesting it be framed in such a non-politically-aligned way that nobody will miss the message.

Food for thought?  I think so.   Great to have a new, interacting colleague!!!