An Evening with Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
"What's Real about Virtual Reality?"
Register before 9:00 am, Monday, Nov 29
Frederick P. Brooks Jr., a native North Carolinian and computer science legend, will close out the Harvard Club’s 2010 lineup of events with a talk on Dec. 1 about "What's Real about Virtual Reality?"
Brooks, 79, directed IBM’s $5 billion hardware and software project to create the first general-purpose computer, the System/360, progenitor to all IBM mainframes. After the 360’s launch in 1964, Brooks founded the University of North Carolina’s Department of Computer Science, which he chaired for 20 years and where he continues to teach (in a building named after him).
Brooks also wrote a seminal book, The Mythical Man-Month (1975, 1995) about the successes and failures of the development of the OS 360. “No book on software project management has been so influential and so timeless as The Mythical Man-Month,” says Amazon.com.
Brooks’ research at UNC has primarily focused on computer architecture (a term which he coined and about which he co-wrote another book Computer Architecture in 1997), software engineering, and interactive 3-D computer graphics ("virtual reality").
In 2010, he released a new book, The Design of Design, which includes essays exploring constants inherent in all design projects and the patterns likely to lead to excellence.
Brooks has received the National Medal of Technology and the Turing Award of the ACM. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and a Foreign Member of the (British) Royal Academy of Engineering, which (he says) is more fun. A Christian, he chaired the Executive Committee for the Billy Graham Research Triangle Crusade in 1973.
Brooks was born in Durham in 1931 and grew up in Greenville, NC. He received an A.B. (1953) summa cum laude in physics from Duke and a Ph.D. (1956) in computer science from Harvard under Howard Aiken, the inventor of the early Harvard computers.
Event Schedule:
Wednesday, December 1, 2010, 5:45 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
5:45 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. Networking with cash bar
6:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Dinner
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. Talk and Q&A
Registration (required):
The cost for the dinner and speaker program is: $26 for members, $28 for one member guest, $30 for nonmembers and additional guests. Click here to buy tickets
Registration Deadline: Monday, November 29 at 9:00 am.
Questions/Comments? Contact Glenn Looper at glooper@nc.rr.com.
Location: Radisson Hotel, 150 Park Drive, RTP
Directions:
Heading West on I-40, take Exit 280, but take a left at the top of the ramp onto Davis Drive, then take first right onto Park Drive.
Heading East on I-40, take exit 280 (Davis Drive) and at top of exit ramp, go straight across Davis Drive onto Park Drive. Follow Park Drive a short distance until you come to a stop sign and then veer to the right up a hill. The hotel will be on your right.