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By Phil Williams
David Gries, a pioneering researcher and author of textbooks in computer science, recently joined the computer science department at UGA , the first professor hired under a major statewide initiative called the Yamacraw Mission. The Yamacraw project is intended to attract millions of investment dollars into Georgia through support of high-tech business and industry. The plan, put together by government and business leaders, was announced a year ago, and the University System of Georgia has already hired more than 20 faculty members to help move the state toward leadership in microchip and software design.
With an international reputation as an author of textbooks on programming and discrete mathematics, Gries assumed his position as Franklin Professor of Computer Science last semester, coming here from Cornell, where he also held a named chair.
“It is an honor to have a person of Gries’s stature on our faculty,” says Rod Canfield, head of the computer science department. “He will play a significant role in the growth of the program that will take place under the Yamacraw Mission.”
Gries, a man whose sense of humor is often directed at himself, believes that even something as complex as computer science can be a very pleasurable adventure for students.
Gries was once invited to deliver the banquet speech at a conference in Limerick, Ireland. He stood before the distinguished gathering in an old castle and began this way:
The World is turning to C,
Though at best it is taught
awkwardly.
But we don’t have to mope
There’s a glimmer of hope
In the methods of formality.
The group understood precisely what he meant. “C” is a popular programming language, but it is contorted and difficult to teach. The “formality” described Gries’s lifelong rigorous approach to computing and software, and the hope was that this formality could overcome C’s inadequacies. What the audience might not have expected was that Gries would give his entire speech in limericks--35 of them--but that’s what he did.
“You have to have fun,” he says. “If it’s not fun for me, it’s not fun for them, either.”
A native of Flushing, N.Y., Gries earned his bachelor’s degree from Queens College in 1960 and then went to work as a civilian mathematician-programmer for the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory at Dahlgren, Va. Afterward, he earned a master’s degree in math from the University of Illinois and a doctoral degree from the Munich Institute of Technology in 1966 in numerical analysis, since theses in computer science were not yet acceptable in academe. He took his first academic position at Stanford in 1966.
“My family and I left Stanford in 1969 because it has no weather,” says Gries. “We moved to Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.--which has weather. We stayed snowed in for the next 30 years.”
While he was at Cornell, Gries’s reputation began to grow. His first book, Compiler Construction for Digital Computers, came out--astonishingly--in 1971, years before the desktop-computer era was even a glimmer in researchers’ eyes. Over the years, Gries produced a series of books that introduced students to the rapidly advancing field of programming. One of his major strengths, in addition to his own considerable research in the field, is developing texts with easy-to-understand language--something almost unknown in early computer science books.
“I am better known for my text writing and my contributions to education than on the wonderfulness of my research,” says Gries. “I believe the problem with the field of introductory programming texts is that too many people with half a mind to write them, do so.”
Gries’s next text, which he is now finishing, is an introduction to programming using the Java programming language. For the first time, it will be entirely on a CDROM; there will be no printed version. Students now taking Gries’s computer science 1301 course are using an initial version of the text and will get a free update in March.
Writing such a text, which includes both words and animations, takes at least five times as much work as writing a standard book, says Gries. His son, Paul, who is a lecturer in the computer science department at the University of Toronto, is a co-author.
Gries is finishing the text and teaching this semester. In the fall, he probably will teach a course in discrete math.
Gries came to UGA because he was impressed by the developing and rapidly expanding computer science program, but he also admits that three decades of winters in New York made Georgia look doubly attractive.
“My wife is from Mississippi, and she said she wanted for me to be the foreigner for a while,” says Gries. “But we stayed Greek. We moved from Ithaca to Athens.”
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