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Gittleman, Art
California State University Long Beach
Long Beach, California
 
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Art sometimes feels like a living museum of electronic digital computing. As a child, he remembers reading a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not piece on the hand calculation of pi to 707 places. By contrast, he recently reviewed a book that treated calculations of pi including some to over 200 billion digits. As a student at UCLA, he marveled at the primeval SWAC computer, one of two in the US, installed in the late 1940s and tested with numerical computations by his dissertation advisor-to-be, Magnus Hestenes. This beast filled a large room with giant tubes, and looked very much like a fictional super brain should. The computing curriculum at UCLA at the time he started consisted of a one-unit class programming the SWAC.

Art’s first technical job involved FORTRAN II programming on an IBM 1620. His numerical computations led to joint publications in the Astrophysical Journal. When he started teaching at Long Beach State College, students in the introductory programming class submitted batch jobs with a turnaround time of at least 24 hours. Trivial syntax errors took that long to fix. Now COBOL is a symbol of the past, but when he taught the introductory class, he found room for five COBOL weeks at the end of the semester to give students an additional career opportunity. Over the year, he added Pascal, LISP, Ada, C++, Java, and C# to the curriculum, as well as artificial intelligence, object-oriented design, and other courses. After these many years, languages seem relatively less important. A recent Communications of the ACM issue on service-oriented computing identifies his current interest.

Although his advisor was a computing pioneer, Art wound up completing a theoretical dissertation in optimal control theory. Rather than continuing in this area, he pursued an avid interest in history, taking over the history of mathematics course, and wrote his first textbook in that subject. He loves teaching and has taught over 60 different mathematics and computer science classes. His students have often been his teachers. In the mid-1980s when interest in object-oriented programming was starting to grow, his student wrote and implemented an object-oriented language for his Master’s thesis. He taught Art the meaning of polymorphism. In 1995, another graduate student was taking a directed study course in the Standard Template Library. Art had heard of Java, but had not looked into to it. His student gave him the white paper, and suggested he read it. Java seemed like more fun than C++, so Art started teaching it and wound up writing several Java textbooks. Appropriately, his most influential student went on to divinity school. This was not the brightest student in a number theory class, but the one who did the best project because he enjoyed it and put himself into it. Seeing the joy this student had was a revelation to someone brought up in the do-what-is-good-for-you school.

Over the years, Art has had other publications and presentations. His latest textbooks cover C# and .NET. He is currently a professor of computer science at California State University Long Beach. He has no plans to retire, as long as he continues getting paid to have fun.

 
 
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   Introduction to computation and programming using Python: with application to understanding data
Guttag J., The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016. 472 pp.  Type: Book (978-0-262529-62-4)

Welcome to the 21st century. Introduction to computation and programming using Python is meant for a two-semester introductory computer science sequence, but it contains only 445 pages with no programming exercises, tips, hints,...

Dec 14 2016  
   Bayesian programming
Bessière P., Mazer E., Ahuactzin J., Mekhnacha K., Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, FL, 2014. 380 pp.  Type: Book (978-1-439880-32-6)

Bayesian programming uses plausible reasoning to extend logic to cases where the premises are not certain. A complete system for efficient problem solving needs modeling, inference algorithms, new programming languages, and new hardwar...

Aug 12 2014  
   Clojure cookbook: recipes for functional programming
VanderHart L., Neufeld R., O’Reilly Media, Inc., Sebastopol, CA, 2014. 476 pp.  Type: Book (978-1-449366-17-9)

Clojure is a Lisp variant that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Like Lisp, it expresses code and data using the same structures, but it also has access to the many Java libraries. With multicore processing growing, interest in f...

Jul 9 2014  
   Rigorous software development: an introduction to program verification
Almeida J., Frade M., Pinto J., de Sousa S., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, New York, NY, 2011. 307 pp.  Type: Book (978-0-857290-17-5)

Program verification has an important role to play in the production of critical software. This book is perhaps better described by its subtitle than by its title. The first half carefully introduces logic without reference to software...

Dec 1 2011  
   The annotated Turing: a guided tour through Alan Turing’s historic paper on computability and the Turing machine
Petzold C., Wiley Publishing, 2008. 384 pp.  Type: Book (9780470229057), Reviews: (1 of 2)

Computability theory textbooks usually have little historical content, while popular treatments usually have few technical details. This book is the exception that carefully explains one of the fundamental papers of the 20th century, p...

Sep 18 2008  
   Beginning XNA 2.0 game programming: from novice to professional
Lobao A., Evangelista B., Farias J., Apress, 2008. 456 pp.  Type: Book (9781590599242)

This well-written book covers the basics of game programming. The subtitle is a bit ambitious because even mastery of this content will not be sufficient to become a professional....

Jul 11 2008  
 
 
 
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