Numerical Explorations

I have had three formal courses in elementary numerical analysis: one at Georgia Tech and two at LaGrange College. All three of these courses were targeting the undergraduate/graduate students at the institutions. The course at Georgia Tech was Scientific Computing I and was taught by Professor Gunter Meyer in the Summer Quarter of 1982. The other two courses were taught by Professor Fay A. Riddle. One of the LC courses was in Fall Quarter 1986 and the other was taught in Fall Quarter 1991. I had a mental break from reality in 1986 and I wound up in the Bradley Center in Columbus, GA for a few months’ hospitalization. I made the grades: B, C, and A respectively. I have done a lot of numerically based computer programming primarily in the Dayton BASIC, FORTRAN IV, and DG Pascal in the era: 1978 to 1980. I entered Georgia Tech in Fall 1980, so I was just able to work on the LC Data General Eclipse minicomputer on some weekends. I was deathly afraid of the Control Data Corporations Cyber supercomputer on the campus of Georgia Tech. The chairperson of the Chemistry Department, Professor Bertrand at Georgia Tech unsuccessfully tried to convince to use the Data General Eclipse minicomputer in the x-ray crystallography lab in the Boggs Chemistry Department building.

In the late 1980s I advanced to doing numerical computing on my first microcomputer, a Commodore Amiga 2000, which came into my life on Saturday, April 30, 1988. I used this machine until late 1994 when I acquired a mom-and-pop store Microsoft Intel personal computer. The Commodore Amiga languages I used were Microsoft Amiga BASIC, Modula-2, and Pecan Pascal. The languages on my first PC were Borland C++ and Borland Turbo Pascal.

I seem to recall that I transitioned to a Dell personal computer in 1998 and was using Visual Studio 6 in the C++ language. I used this computer along with another Dell personal computer which was purchased in 2002. I started programming in Java in the summer of 1999 when I took a course in object-oriented computer languages featuring the Sun Microcomputers version of Java. The Java course was taught by Professor Homer Carlisle who later became a doctoral faculty advisor of mine.

There was a lull in my numerical analytic software development during the late 1990s until the mid- 2000s. That period was the time required for me to earn a Master of Software Engineering and Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science in Summer 2000 (August) and Fall 2005 (December) at Auburn University, respectively. I bought an Apple Power Mac with dual G5 IBM 64-bit microprocessors in December 2004. Unfortunately, it did not survive until about 2008 to 2009. In 2009, I bought a Dell computer running a CoreI7 processor and Vista Ultimate operating system along the software: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional and Cakewalk SONAR 8 Producer Edition.

I started doing a lot of software development covering a wide range of the spectra of computer algorithms in February 2015. These projects in Visual Studio 2008 and later Visual Studio 2015 were uploaded to the defunct Microsoft TechNet Forum and Gallery. I think I had around 250 projects in Vanilla C, Win32 C, Win32 C++, and C#. I bought my last Dell personal computer in December 2015. I do have a fair recently purchased Dell notebook computer.

Currently, I am teaching myself Python and I hope later to expand my knowledge of JavaScript.