Facts: - birth name: joseph frederick traub - thesis year: 1959 - death date: 24 august 2015 - field: computer science - doctoral advisor: henry m. foley - spouse: pamela mccorduck - work institution: columbia university - birth date: 24 june 1932 - thesis title: variational helium calculations on the triplet-2s and triplet-2p states of - nationality: united states - death place: santa fe , new mexico , u.s. - birth place: karlsruhe , germany - alma mater: city -rrb- columbia univeristy -lrb- ph.d. , applied mathematics , 1959 college -rrb- of new york -lrb- b.s. , 1954 Based on these bullet points, write a short biography describing the life of joseph f. traub .
The answer to this question is:
joseph frederick traub -lrb- june 24 , 1932 -- august 24 , 2015 -rrb- was an american computer scientist .he was the edwin howard armstrong professor of computer science at columbia university and external professor at the santa fe institute .he held positions at bell laboratories , university of washington , carnegie mellon , and columbia , as well as sabbatical positions at stanford , berkeley , princeton , california institute of technology , and technical university , munich .traub was the author or editor of ten monographs and some 120 papers in computer science , mathematics , physics , finance , and economics .in 1959 he began his work on optimal iteration theory culminating in his 1964 monograph , which is still in print .subsequently he pioneered work with henryk wozniakowski on computational complexity applied to continuous scientific problems -lrb- information-based complexity -rrb- .he collaborated in creating significant new algorithms including the jenkins-traub algorithm for polynomial zeros , as well as the kung-traub , shaw-traub , and brent-traub algorithms .one of his research areas was continuous quantum computing .from 1971 to 1979 he headed the computer science department at carnegie mellon and led it from a critical period to eminence -lrb- see joseph traub digital archive at carnegie mellon -rrb- .from 1979 to 1989 he was the founding chair of the computer science department at columbia .from 1986 to 1992 he served as founding chair of the computer science and telecommunications board , national academies and held the post again 2005-2009 .traub was founding editor-in-chief , journal of complexity , in 1985 until his death in 2015 .both his research and institution building work have had a major impact on the field of computer science .