Encyclopedia of Computer Science

Anthony Ralston is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Mathematics at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he was from 1965 to 1995 and where he was the founding-chair of the Department of Computer Science. He is the author or editor of 16 books including a well-known early textbook on Numerical Analysis. He has been the editor or coeditor of all four editions of the Encyclopedia of Computer Science, the most recent of which was published in 2000.

Professor Ralston's S.B. and Ph.D. are both from M.I.T. in Mathematics. He began his academic career as a numerical analyst but, owing to a short attention span, at one time or another his main interest has been computer science, discrete mathematics, or mathematics education. He was President of the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Federation of Information Processing Societies. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society of Arts.

Ralston has lived in London since 1995. Like Maurer he is a quondam, but not good squash player. Nowadays he confines himself to tennis at which he is also riot good except perhaps on an age-related basis. He sits on the board of directors of the large apartment block in which he lives, thereby protecting his investment, and sits on various other committees. He keeps in touch with children and grandchildren by making regular trips back to the US despite the worsening ravages of jet lag.

Edwin D. Reilly is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the State University of New York at Albany. He served as the first chairman of its computer science department when founded in 1967 and as the first director of its computing center in 1965. Prior to that time, he served in computer management positions at the General Electric Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady, NY. He began his career in computing at the National Security Agency in Washington in 1955. He holds the Ph.D. in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is currently president of his consulting firm Cybernetic Information Systems. He is the co-author of the textbooks Pascalgorithms (Houghton-Mifflin) and VAX Assembly Language (Macmillan, US). He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the IEEE Computer Society, the American Physical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, Sigma Xi, and the America Association for the Advancement of Science.

David Hemmendinger is Associate Professor of Computer Science and department chair at Union College, Schenectady, New York. He has also taught computer science at Wright State University, Ohio. His interests include programming languages, concurrent programming, and formal verification of hardware designs. He began work in computer science in 1981, having previously taught philosophy at the City University of New York, and at Antioch and Kenyon Colleges. He has degrees from Harvard (B.A.) and Stanford Universities (M.S. in mathematics), Yale (M.A., Ph.D. in philosophy) and Wright State University (M.S. in computer science). He is a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi.