Kahan, William
Biography, A.M. Turing Award, & Facts
William Kahan, in full William Morton Kahan, (born June 5, 1933, Toronto, Ontario, Canada), Canadian mathematician and computer scientist and winner of the 1989 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his “fundamental contributions to numerical analysis.”
Kahan earned a bachelor’s degree (1954), a master’s degree (1956), and a doctorate (1958), all in mathematics, from the University of Toronto. Most of his career was spent at the University of California, Berkeley (1969–2008). Kahan was instrumental in establishing a floating-point standard, endorsed in 1985 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), that is used by all modern computers to ensure that calculations on different machines will produce identical results.
Kahan was elected to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM; 1994), the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (2005), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003). In addition to the Turing Award, Kahan received an ACM G.E. Forsythe Memorial Award (1972) and an IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (2000).
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