Van Loan Appointed to Named Professorship

Clipped from the Dec. 10, 1998 issue of the Cornell Chronicle

| return to News page |

Joseph C. Ford was a graduate of the Sibley School of Mechanical Engineering at Cornell in the class of 1911. He was a manufacturing executive and a director of Wisconsin Telephone, the First National Bank of Madison and Ray-O-Vac Co. In addition, he was founder and chair of the Madison Community Trust Fund and founder and president of the Celon Co. The Joseph C. Ford Professorship in Mechanical Engineering was established in 1958 through a bequest in the will of his wife, Vera Veerhusen Ford, for the purpose of providing a distinguished professorship in mechanical engineering and in such specialized fields in the College of Engineering as the university may determine. Because of the growth of the endowment, the board of trustees voted in 1980 to authorize the appointment of two or more concurrent holders of the Joseph C. Ford Professorships.

Van Loan has a unique standing in the field of numerical linear algebra, which is the foundation of all scientific computing. He is one of two in this country to dominate this field (the other is Gene Golub of Stanford, recently his co-author); their book is the bible in the discipline. Van Loan's work impacts the areas of eigen problems, least squares, parallel computing and Fourier analysis. For Van Loan teaching and research are inextricably mixed. He routinely teaches all five of the recitation sections of his large (over 200 students) freshman introduction to computing course. This reflects an extraordinary outpouring of time, energy and concern unsurpassed in this department. He also was the primary force behind building the undergraduate program web site for computer science. In addition to his service as director of undergraduate studies and his teaching and research activities, Van Loan has 26 undergraduate advisees. One of his students said it well: "He is the most caring, principled, hard-working and effective adviser I know."