page_title: Kenneth E. Iverson
section_title: Harvard (1955–1960)
hierarchical_section_title: Kenneth E. Iverson / Work / Harvard (1955–1960)
caption_attribution_description: English: Simplex algorithm in Iverson notation[12][13]
context_page_description: Kenneth Eugene Iverson was a Canadian computer scientist noted for the development of the programming language APL. He was honored with the Turing Award in 1979 "for his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL; for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice".
context_section_description: Iverson stayed on at Harvard as an assistant professor to implement the world's first graduate program in "automatic data processing".
  Many people think that Aiken was interested only in scientific computers. This was simply not so. During one coffee hour, Aiken turned to Ken Iverson, who had just finished his Ph.D., and said: "These machines are going to be immensely important for business, and I want you to prepare and teach a course in business data processing next fall." There had never been such a course anywhere in the world. Ken was qualified only because he was a mathematician. I was so excited by the prospect that I immediately volunteered to be Ken's graduate teaching assistant.
  — Frederick Brooks Jr., Aiken and the Harvard "Comp Lab", in I. Bernard Cohen and Gregory W. Welch, editors, Makin' Numbers, MIT Press, 1999, page 141.
  It was in this period that Iverson developed notation for describing and analyzing various topics in data processing, for teaching classes, and for writing (with Brooks) Automatic Data Processing. He was "appalled" to find that conventional mathematical notation failed to fill his needs, and began work on extensions to the notation that were more suitable.  In particular, he adopted the matrix algebra used in his thesis work, the systematic use of matrices and higher-dimensional arrays in tensor analysis, and operators in the sense of Heaviside in his treatment of Maxwell's equations, higher-order functions on function argument(s) with a function result.  The notation was also field-tested in the business world in 1957 during a 6-month sabbatical spent at McKinsey & Company. The first published paper using the notation was The Description of Finite Sequential Processes, initially Report Number 23 to Bell Labs and later revised and presented at the Fourth London Symposium on Information Theory in August 1960.
  Iverson stayed at Harvard for five years but failed to get tenure, because "[he hadn't] published anything but the one little book".
caption: Simplex algorithm in Iverson notation[12][13]
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