Jacob T. Schwartz

Jacob Theodore Schwartz, known as Jack, lived from 1930 to 2009 and was an American mathematician and computer scientist who became a professor of computer science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. Born in the Bronx, he studied at the City College of New York and received his doctorate in mathematics from Yale University in 1952 with a thesis on linear elliptic differential operators under Nelson Dunford. His research began with the theory of linear operators, on which he wrote the three-volume textbook Linear Operators with Dunford, and later moved to programming languages, parallel computing, robotics and computational logic. He designed the SETL programming language, started the NYU Ultracomputer project and founded the NYU Department of Computer Science. He directed the Information Science and Technology Office of DARPA from 1986 to 1989 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976.