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  \textbf{\textsc{STANFORD UNIVERSITY}}\\[5pt]
  \textbf{\textsc{DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS}}\\[5pt]
  \Large{\textbf\textsc{{DEPARTMENTAL SEMINAR}}}
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\begin{center}
  4:15 p.m., Tuesday, March 21, 2006\\
  Sequoia Hall Room 200\\
  (Cookies at 3:45 in 1st Floor Lounge)
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\begin{center}
  \textsl{Joseph Grcar}\\
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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\begin{center}
  \textbf{John von Neumann's Analysis of Gaussian Elimination\\
and the Invention of Modern Computing}
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\noindent
Just when modern computers were being invented (those digital,
electronic, and programmable), John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine
wrote a paper to illustrate the mathematical analyses that they believed
would be needed to use the new machines effectively and to guide the
development of still faster computers. Their foresight and the
congruence of historical events made their work the first modern paper in
numerical analysis. Von Neumann once remarked that to found a
mathematical theory one had to prove the first theorem, which he and
Goldstine did concerning the accuracy of mechanized Gaussian elimination,
but the paper was about more than that. Von Neumann and Goldstine
described what they surmised would be the significant questions once
computers became available for computational science, and they suggested
enduring ways to answer them.

\noindent
This talk takes a broad view of the evolution of computing before
computers, a good part of it connected to statistics, and then briefly
describes the highlights of von Neumann and Goldstine's results.


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