Cornell Bowers College of Computing and Information Science
photo of David Bindel

Story

Mini-symposium honors CS Prof Charlie Van Loan

CS Professor David Bindel and Ilse Ipsen (NC State) jointly organized a two-part mini-symposium in honor of CS Professor Charlie Van Loan’s retirement on July 13 at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Boston. The afternoon session was standing-room-only as colleagues gave their well-wishes and were able to see some fascinating talks on topics related to Charlie’s work.  

The abstract reads:

"Charlie Van Loan has contributed broadly to numerical linear algebra and computational science and is one of the best known expositors in the area. His work includes six books on computational science and numerical linear algebra, including the widely-used Matrix Computations with Gene Golub (now in its fourth edition). His research work includes high-performance GEMM-based BLAS and parallel factorization schemes, eigenvalue and SVD computations, tensors, and the many dubious ways to compute the matrix exponential. The talks in this minisymposium will highlight some of the many contributions of Charlie Van Loan’s career."

Speakers described a wide variety of areas Charlie touched over his career: Tammy Kolda and Orly Alter spoke about tensor factorizations for data compression and cancer diagnostic, Chris Bischof spoke about structured simulations of super carbon nanotubes, Bo Kågström spoke on work with Charlie on fast linear algebra software, Nick Higham spoke on Charlie’s the matrix exponential, Rob Schreiber spoke on a rotation-plus-rank-one decomposition from computational imaging, and Cleve Moler spoke on computing zeros of polynomials.