William Kahan
| William Morton Kahan | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
June 5, 1933 Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Fields |
Mathematics Computer Science |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto |
| Thesis | Gauss-Seidel Methods Of Solving Large Systems Of Linear Equations (1958) |
| Doctoral advisor | Byron Alexander Griffith |
| Doctoral students | James Demmel |
| Known for |
IEEE 754 Kahan summation algorithm |
| Notable awards |
Turing Award (1989) IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (2000) National Academy of Engineering ACM Fellow |
William Morton Kahan (born June 5, 1933) is a mathematician and computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1989 for "his fundamental contributions to numerical analysis", was named an ACM Fellow in 1994, and inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2005.
He attended the University of Toronto, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1954, his master's degree in 1956, and his Ph.D. in 1958, all in the field of mathematics. Kahan is now emeritus professor of mathematics and of electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley.
Kahan was the primary architect behind the IEEE 754-1985 standard for floating-point computation (and its radix-independent follow-on, IEEE 854). He has been called “The Father of Floating Point,” since he was instrumental in creating the original IEEE 754 specification. Kahan continued his contributions to the IEEE 754 revision that led to the current IEEE 754 standard.
In the 1980s he developed the program "paranoia", a benchmark that tests for a wide range of potential floating point bugs. It would go on to detect the infamous Pentium division bug, and continues to have important uses to this day. He also developed the Kahan summation algorithm, an important algorithm for minimizing error introduced when adding a sequence of finite precision floating point numbers. He coined the term "The Table-Maker's Dilemma" for the unknown cost of correctly rounding transcendental functions to some preassigned number of digits.
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