Paul Swarztrauber

Swarztrauber, Paul Noble Of Boulder, Colorado died on August 8, 2011. He was born on November 2, 1936 to Archie Douglas and Eleanor Miriam (Sayrs) Swarztrauber in Zion, Illinois. He grew up in Zion, Illinois which is located just south of the Wisconsin border on Lake Michigan. He attended Lakeview Elementary School, Central Junior High School, and Zion Benton Township High School from which he graduated in 1954. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1959 with a degree in Engineering Physics and experience on the ILLIAC supercomputer under the tutelage of Lloyd Fosdick. This was to define his career. Following this he spent three years in the Air Force at their Special Weapons Center, which was located on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1963 he went to work as a scientific programmer at the then embryonic National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Concurrently he attended the University of Colorado from which he obtained a PhD in mathematics in 1970 under the direction of Robert Richtmyer. This led to a gradual shift of his responsibilities at NCAR from assisting researchers with application programming work toward research in computational mathematics, with emphasis on methods for computer aided weather and climate prediction. He published over sixty journal papers in various areas of computational mathematics with this emphasis. He also authored several large scientific software packages that remain in general use throughout the scientific community. He was invited to present his work at Harvard, Stanford, Illinois, Argonne, Oak Ridge, NIST, NASA, and Los Alamos as well as the Soviet Union, Russia, UK, Norway, South Africa, and Japan. He taught graduate computational mathematics at Stanford and Florida State University. He served on committees for the National Research Council and was the first director of the Computational Mathematics Program at the National Science Foundation. He was an Adjoint Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado. He was a career long member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics where he served as conference organizer, lecturer, Council member, and as an editor for several journals. He holds two US patents on the "Communication Machine", which orchestrates communication between an unlimited number of computer processors. He retired from NCAR in 2004 with the position of Senior Scientist Emeritus. He is survived by his wife Suzanne, of 50 years, and for the past decade they have wintered in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is also survived by his son Mr. Ronald Paul Swarztrauber, his daughter Dr. Karleen Swarztrauber, and his brother Admiral Sayre Archie Schwarztrauber. His sister, JoAnn Alice Owen, preceded him in death. A memorial service for Paul will be held at the NCAR Mesa Lab on Sunday, September 18, 2011 from 2-5 PM.