Fritz Bauer on the Householder Symposia
From: Cleve Moler
[At the Householder Symposium in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago,
F. L. (Fritz) Bauer gave an after-banquet talk, remembering the
Symposium's namesake, and the early history of the meetings.
Here are his notes for the talk. -- Cleve]
How the Gatlinburgs came about
My first steps in the Golden West
The next Gatlinburgs
Gatlinburg goes Overseas
Alston gets remarried
Alston dies
The Gatlinburgs go on
Date: July 11, 1996
Subject: Bauer Remembers Householder and the Gatlinburg Meetings
(Posted in NA Digest, July 18, 1996, vol. 96, no. 27)
Memories of Alston Householder (1904-1993)
F. L. Bauer
Householder Symposium XIII
June 17 - June 21, 1996
Pontresina, Switzerland
The idea of a Symposium on Matrix Computations came up during the Ann
Arbor Summer Session in 1960, when a group of people including Alston
Householder, the Todds, Wallace Givens, George Forsythe, Dick Varga,
Jim Wilkinson and I happened to be assembled at the Old German's
Inn. In due course -- nine month later -- the first Gatlinburg
Symposium was held in 1961, April 24-29. I was visiting Oak Ridge
National Laboratory just at the time, and Alston asked me to help him
with the local organization. I had not been in Gatlinburg before;
on my first visit to Oak Ridge in 1957 I had only seen, from
Knoxville Airport, the Smokey Mountains in the usual haze. Coming into
the mountain, just at the time when blossoming started, made a deep
impression on me -- in Mainz, in the Rhine valley, I was used to this,
but the common picture a European has of America is so much
dominated by wide plains, prairies and buffalos, terribly hot in the
summer and freezingly cold in the winter, that Gatlinburg came as a
complete surprise. My fascination was also influenced by the event. A
group of Numerical Analysts -- or should I more properly say
Numerical Algebraists -- from places all over the world came together
in the Mountain View Hotel for a genuine Working Conference, very
favorably contrasting the mammoth congresses. This was Alston's big
idea, and he convinced SIAM, NSF, AEC, and the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, which we usually called Mr. Carbide, that it was worth trying.
Maybe I should report on how I came to know Alston. I met him for the
first time in October 1955, in a national meeting on computer use
organized by Professor Alwin Walther in Darmstadt, Germany. Alston
gave a lecture with the title "Numerical Mathematics from the
viewpoint of electronic digital computers". A reprint of this paper
which was published in an obscure German Journal ("Nachrichtentechnische
Fachberichte") can be found in the appendix. It gives a short, remarkably
clear listing of the essentials of Numerical Mathematics. This was
Alston's admirable style.
When in 1957 I had a chance to visit the important places in the U.S.A.
I quite naturally included Oak Ridge in my wish list, next to UCLA-INA
(where I met George Forsythe), RAND Corporation, Wayne State University
Detroit (where Wallace Givens just held a famous Conference on Matrix
Computations), Ann Arbor (where I met John Carr), Argonne National
Laboratory (where I met Moll Flanders), University of Illinois Digital
Computer Laboratory (where I met Abe Taub), National Bureau of Standards,
Office of Naval Research, UNIVAC (where I met Grace Hopper and John
Mauchly), IBM, Bell Labs (where I met Richard Hamming), MIT (where I met
Howard Aiken). It was a tremendous seven weeks, from August 16, to
October 5, 1957. I met many more people than I had planned, among others
Richard Courant, Eugene Isaacson, John McPherson, H. F. Buckner, Ky Fan,
Gertrude Blanch, Evelyn Frank. I learned to appreciate American
hospitality. My transportation over the Atlantic had been arranged for
by Military Air Transport System and since the Office of Naval
Research was sponsoring it, I was even carried with the Generals
Machine. Quite fittingly, when I arrived on my flight back in Francfort,
I was greeted by the news that the Russians had started the Sputnik.
I made a few more trips to the U.S.A. In April 1958 I was
contacting an ACM group on behalf of our proposals that led to ALGOL
58. In September 1959 I stayed for a while with Alston
Householder, in 1960 I met him and a few others at the Ann Arbor
Summer Session. In turn, Alston and his wife Belle visited us
in Mainz in August 1962 on their way to the Munich IFIP Congress.
After the first Gatlinburg Symposium, I took part in several others.
The second one was held October 21-26, 1963, short after I had
accepted a professorship at Munich and had returned to my home town.
While the second meeting dealt with approximations, the third and
all the others coming dealt again with matrix calculations.
Gatlinburg III took place April 13-17, 1964. A photograph
showing Jim Wilkinson, Wallace Givens, George Forsythe, Alston
Householder, Peter Henrici, and myself has been reprinted in the
"Users Guide to MATLAB 4.2"; a copy can be found in the
appendix. In May 1964, Alston visited us in Munich, where he received a
Honorary Doctorate. He came again in the summer 1965, when Richard
Varga, invited on a Guest Professorship, also stayed for a quarter. This
was the time when my scientific collaboration with Alston came to a
peak.
There was a longer wait for Gatlinburg IV. In mid-August
1966, I was with Alston at the International Congress of
Mathematicians in Moscow, where -- by the way -- we met Sobolew
and Kantorovic. We went together with Jim Wilkinson to the home of
Tychonoff who treated us with Mulberry liquor in an unforgettable way.
Immediately following there was a matrix computations symposium
organized by Rigal in Besancon, a kind of alternative Gatlinburg
III. In the first quarter of 1967, I was a guest professor at
Stanford University and visited together with my wife Irene Alston and
Belle on my way home.
Gatlinburg IV then took place April 13-19, 1969. Mr. Carbide
supported us again in a grand way. The Cocktail parties were held at the
swimming pool which so that the liquor could easily be dumped into the
basin if the police raided the hotel (Tennessee was a dry state!). Then
Alston retired from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and although he
stayed on in the area, accepting a professorship at the University of
Tennesee, a new location for a Gatlinburg V had to be found. Richard
Varga succeeded in doing so. The meeting took place June 4-10, 1972
at Los Alamos with the local support of Nick Metropolis. It was again a
great success.
Once the meetings had moved away from Gatlinburg, it was time to think
also of having a Gatlinburg somewhere in Europe. France, which was very
attractive, was not a candidate because of the recent Besancon
meeting, and England did not work out. But in Munich in 1973 the
President of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences was very open-minded
and had good contacts to the Stifterverband fur die Deutsche
Wissenschaft, a sort of German NSF. Thus, I was able to arrange for a
Gatlinburg VI at the Kurhotel Enzensberg in Hopfen am See, a small
resort place at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, quite similar to
Gatlinburg in Tennessee, but now with snow instead of Dogwoods
and Mountain Laurels. The meeting was held December 15-22,
1974. I was remarried then, and my wife Hildegard, a mathematician,
took part. It was a very happy time for me, and I was in such a good mood
that I even played tricks on Olga Taussky-Todd, explaining to her that
the "Kurzentrum" meant a short piece (a "Trum" in Bavarian dialect) of wood.
In 1977, Gene Golub took the meeting back to the U.S.A. Gatlinburg VII
was held December 12-16, 1977 in Asilomar. It was a wonderful
place and thanks to Gene gave a lasting impression. In 1981 Jim
Wilkinson and Leslie Fox moved the meeting to Oxford, England. This was
for a while the last Gatlinburg meeting I visited. Around the middle of
the seventies I had reoriented the center of my activity towards
programming languages and programming methodology, as a
consequence of my building up a Computer Science department in Munich.
Gatlinburg IX took place in 1984 at Waterloo, Canada, organized by
J. A. George; Gatlinburg X in 1987 at Fairfield Glades, U.S.A., organized
by Pete Stewart (Alston attended it); Gatlinburg XI in
1990 at Tylosand, Sweden, organized by Ake Bjork.
All this time, Alston was no longer active, but he was the
soul of the Gatlinburgs, which had come to be established in a regular
3-year cycle. Whenever I came to the West Coast, and this was quite
regularly the case in the eighties due to a cooperation I had with IBM at
Santa Teresa Lab, I visited Alston Householder at Malibu, where he
lived, near to his son John and his daughter Jackie, after his wife Belle
deceased in 1975. His home became almost a second home place to me.
His son John wrote me once, that his family considered me to be Alston's
best friend. I was very pleased and very proud of this.
Alston came to visit my wife Hildegard and me from time to time in our
country house near Munich and in our apartment in town. At one of these
occasions Alston met Heidi Vogg, Hildegard's sister. Shortly after, Heidi
was run over by a car and severely injured; her recovery took more than
a year. During this time, a romance started between Alston and Heidi,
and they were married in spring 1984. Heidi was a great help to Alston,
whose health was getting weaker, and Alston was a man who could give
Heidi stability and warmth.
In June 1993, Alston and Heidi came to the Gatlinburg XII meeting at
Lake Arrowhead, which was organized by Gene Golub and T.F. Chan. They
enjoyed it tremendously. Three weeks later, on July 4, 1993, we received
the terrible message that Alston had died of a heart attack. Although it
was not completely unexpected, there was no special indication of an
acute danger. Alston was 90 years old. He had had a full life, with
many friends and people who admired him. He was an American in
the best sense of the word, liberal and socially conscious. Yet
he was a cosmopolitan with a thorough knowledge of foreign
languages and cultures. He was a mathematician of distinction. Above
all he was a friendly human being. We miss him very much.
The Gatlinburg Symposia on Matrix Calculations have a prehistory that
should not be forgotten. The "Conference on Matrix Computations"
Wallace Givens organized in 1957, has sometimes been called
Gatlinburg 0. But already in 1951 Olga Taussky-Todd
(1906-1995) had organized on the UCLA campus a symposium on
"Simultaneous Linear Equations and the Determination of
Eigenvalues". In these days there were exactly two electronic
computers of the modern generation in operation in the U.S.A., but quite a
number were soon to follow. Matrix calculations have been a testbed
for the development of the computer.
A unique feature of the Gatlinburgs is that there is no formal
organization responsible for them; there is, as Alston once put it, not
even a copyright on the name. In 1974, Alston, in SIAM review, discussed
and defended the character of the Gatlinburgs as "closed"
meetings, limited in attendance -- similar to the Oberwolfach
meetings in mathematics. Alston wrote "Admittedly, no committee,
however constituted, can hope that its selections will be the best
possible". But with a truly international organizing committee, it is
possible to come close to this aim. The Gatlinburgs have shown this so
far, and as long as they continue to bring the elite of Numerical Algebra
together, they will continue. Meanwhile, I may express the thanks of the
people assembled here to the International Committee, chaired by
Dianne O'Leary and to the local organizers of Gatlinburg XIII, Walter
Gander and Martin Gutknecht, for their excellent job.