Computer Science Marches On

With a note on the death of someone who tried to stop it

Arnold the Allosaurus is moving to new digs. All during my time at Princeton, he held sway in cavernous Guyot Hall, the home of several earth and environmental science departments. Thanks to a huge gift from alumnus Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, Guyot Hall will be rebuilt and expanded as the new home for the Department of Computer Science and several affiliated centers.

 

Tongue-in-cheek source

Arnold will travel to the new Environmental Studies and Schools of Engineering and Applied Sciences complex being built along Ivy Lane. The Guyot name will travel with him.

The Old New Building

I remember when the current Computer Science building was new. It was built in 1989 after I arrived. One striking fact in retrospect is that it isn’t named for anyone. Its name is the “Computer Science Building.” Another fact is that it has our favorite open problem encoded into its brickwork:

 

Composite crop of src1, src2

At the dedication, Bob Sedgewick called this “a gargoyle for the 1990s.” A story at that time quoted that as a “20th century gargoyle.” Well, we are almost a quarter way into the 21st century and no resolution is in sight. Will the problem outlive the building?—it will almost certainly outlive CS occupancy of the building.

Before 1985, we were part of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and occupied one floor of one wing of the Engineering Quadrangle. That’s all Ken remembers from his time in 1977–81 as an undergrad. He just went back for an off-year reunion and marveled at vast amount of construction in progress all over the campus. The 1989 building was outgrown by the field itself: right now CS-affiliated faculty and staff are housed in nine locations and 25% of undergraduates choose the CS major.

Other Gifts

Large gifts for computing have been made all around the country at an increasing pace. At Georgia Tech I was among the first occupants of the Christopher W. Klaus Advanced Computing Building. The building was announced in 2000 and finished in 2006.

Some gifts are from people I know well. Mike Fischer and his wife Alice recently gave $2 million to the Computer Science Endowed Fund at the University of New Haven. Alice started Computer Science as a program at New Haven while Mike has been at Yale all the same time. Here they are looking like when I knew them from my own time at Yale:

Mike’s late brother Patrick was at Penn State and then Vanderbilt when I knew him best. Vanderbilt in 1998 received perhaps the largest university gift ever in real dollar terms. It was from the family that owns Ingram Micro but was not specifically for computing.

Coda

I say this because Patrick was a target of someone who tried to stop the progress of computing. His secretary opened the package addressed to him and was severely injured, needing hospitalization for three weeks. Patrick later speculated that he was targeted because he “went from pure math to theoretical computer science.”

Vanderbilt memorial source

Other targets were more and less fortunate. Three were killed. David Gelernter opened the package himself in the Yale Computer Science mail room and was left with permanent damage to his right eye and the loss of four fingers of his right hand. The sender of those bombs died by his own hand in prison ten days ago. We will not say any more about him.

Open Problems

One of William Shakespeare’s best known lines is, “Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” Will the new buildings and endowments in computer science outlive “P=NP?”