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David Gries -Home Page;David Gries;William L. Lewis Professor of Engineering;Dr. rer. nat., Munich Institute of Technology, 1966;My interests are in programming methodology, in particular the formal;development of programs, and in related areas such as programming;languages, programming language semantics, and logic. I am as;interested in the teaching of these topics as I am in further research;in them. In fact, understanding how logic and formalism can be taught;as a useful tool at the freshman/sophomore college level has been an;overriding concern of mine in the 1990's.;Click on any of the following items for more information.; Teaching logic as a tool; Curriculum Vita; Short biography; Texts written by Gries; The programming language Polya; Announcement of DIMACS Symposium on teaching logic;Links to papers for the symposium.; Cornell CS Department Home Page;Computer Science, Upson Hall;Cornell University;Ithaca, NY 14853;(607) 255-9207 gries@cs.cornell.edu;Short biography of David Gries;I was born in Flushing, New York, and spent 21 years there before I;escaped. I received a B.S. Queens College in 1960 and went to work;for the U.S. Naval Weapons laboratory (as a civilian) as a;mathematician-programmer. I met my wife-to-be, Elaine, a few;months later, and we were married in November 1961.;We went to Illinois for more education. I received a Masters degree;in math from Illinois in 1963. My assistantship was to help two;Germans, Manfred Paul and Ruediger Wiehle, write a full Algol compiler;for the IBM 7090 computer --it was fun, figuring out how to implement;recursion efficiently before there were many papers on the topic.;This ended up in my wife and I going to Munich for almost three years.;I received my doctorate under F.L. Bauer and Joseph Stoer from MIT;(the Munich Institute of Technology, Germany) in June 1966. This was;in math, or numerical analysis, since computer science theses were not;yet kosher.;I was an assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford from;1966 to 1969. While at Stanford, our twins Paul and Susan were born.;What made it more exciting than usual was that they were born on the;birthday of myself and my twin --26 April. So, when my twin is in;town, Elaine makes four birthday cakes.;We left Stanford because it had no weather. We moved to Cornell, which;has weather, in 1969 and have been snowed in ever since. I was;Department Chair in 1982-87, and I became the William L. Lewis;Professor of Engineering in 1992. I had a Guggenheim Fellowship in;1984-85.;Return to table of contents;I am better known for my;text writing;and my contributions to education than on the;wonderfulness of my research. Do what you are good at; bloom where;you are planted. I have received a number of awards for contributions;to education: the 1994 IEEE Taylor L. Booth Award, the ACM SIGCSE;award in 1991, a Cornell Outstanding Educator Award in 1990, the Clark;Award from Cornell's College of Arts & Sciences in 1986, and the;American Federation of Information Processing Societies' (AFIPS);education award in 1985.;I am proud of all my Ph.D. advisees, but two stand out. Susan;Owicki's thesis laid the foundation for proofs of correctness of;parallel programs, with the notion of interference-freeness.;A paper co-authored by us on the topic won the 1977 ACM Award for best;paper in programming langauges and systems. And;T.V. Raman's;thesis just won the ACM best-dissertation award for 1993-94. Raman designed;and implemented a system for "speaking" any tex/latex document,;including technical articles and books. The same document can be printed;or spoken. Being able to speak;mathematics in an effective manner was an important goal of his work.;Reading for the Blind is already using his system to produce audio;cassettes.;I served as Chair of the Computing Research Association (then the;Computer Science Board) in the late 1980's when it opened its office;in Washington and began seriously to represent computing research;interests. I also conducted the Taulbee Surveys in the period;1984-1991 and am proud of obtaining essentially complete responses;from PhD-granting computer science departments during that period. No;other comparable survey has had such a response rate. One year, it;required only 256 telephone calls to get the 150 departments to send;in their questionnaires. I received the Computing Research;Association's 1991 Service Award for this work on the Surveys and for;chairing the Association during its move toward respectability and;responsibility.;I am currently editor for IPL, Acta Informatica,;Formal Aspects of Computing, and Software Concepts and;Tools. This editing keeps me busy, but I enjoy it. I try to take;an interest in individual papers, when I know the area, and will;suggest substantial rewrites myself when I believe it will help. Serve;where you can best serve. Fred;B. Schneider and I are co-editors of Springer Verlag Texts and;Monographs in Computer Science.;What do I do in my spare time? It used to be sports like golf,;softball, volleyball, swimming and table tennis. (Once, in China, I;split my pants playing ping pong. An hour later, while giving a;lecture, I mentioned that the audience should not laugh when I turned;around, and I explained why. The interpreter spoke, and everyone;laughed. However, I don't know whether he told the truth or just;said, "Gries made a joke, laugh.".) I also used to sing barbershop and;Gilbert and Sullivan. And working around the house --carpentry,;wiring, remodeling-- has taken a lot of time and yielded considerable;satisfaction.;Return to table of contents;