Cleve was a great teacher and I inherited from him all my perspectives on computing and mathematics. I received my Ph.D. in 1973 studying under the direction of Cleve Moler. There weren't too many realistic gsvd applications back then, but later on in the 80's some critical star wars applications had gsvd solutions. After I graduated I spent a year and a half at the University of Manchester as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Mathematics. It remains one of the high points of my academic career.
Nothing compares with the freedom and excitement of a post-doc.
Around about that time I met Gene Golub and we had some great collaborations. In the summer of 1977 we co-taught a workshop on matrix computations at Johns Hopkins and from that developed our book on the subject. I have always worked in the area of matrix computations and have written papers on various eigenvalue, least squares, and linear equation problems. To me, the matrix problems that arise in signal processing and control theory are particularly interesting. I have been a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell since 1975.