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Hacken, George
Altman Research
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
 
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Sputnik, the very first artificial satellite, was launched from Kazakhstan almost a half-century ago. This unexpected event sent shockwaves through the US’s math-science public education establishment. George Hacken was in high school, and was lucky enough to pass the exam for a Sputnik-inspired extracurricular IBM/Joe Berg Foundation course in discrete math (whose textbook was Kemeny, Snell, and Thomson’s Finite mathematics). As must be true of many CR readers, he never got over it, that is, over logic and discrete math.

He majored in physics (AB and PhD) at Columbia, where he stayed on as a researcher until 1976, and enjoyed with fellow students and post-docs the reflected glory of his thesis sponsor’s 1975 Nobel Prize. (Professor James Rainwater had him pegged from the beginning as a computer geek, and George did his best to be useful as a discrete math, computational complement of his awesome physico-geometric intuition.)

His first program (1962, Fortran II, IBM 1620) was a multidimensional constrained minimization problem; it was a lesson par excellence in the downright practicality of trying to “get it right the first time” — a personal augury of formal methods. The year 1976 saw another defining moment: he serendipitously came upon E.W. Dijkstra’s A discipline of programming. He had, by then, written approximately 5,000 programs, the later ones for a special, scientific model of the IBM 360, the 44, and all in connection with physics research. Dijkstra’s masterpiece changed his life, as it changed the lives of many others.

Career progression, not necessarily logical but certainly chronological, saw computing venues in telephone company rate-structure calculations; computations of credit card delinquency risk; flight simulation; factory-automation and sawmill process control; radiation-dosimetry safety-critical database work; and railroad-car brake control. These projects were followed by a 15-year aerospace defense stint at Singer-Kearfott/Plessey/GEC-Marconi, where embedded computers effected guidance, navigation, and control, and command, control, communications, and intelligence. There was also a concurrent activity as adjunct professor of computer science at William Paterson University.

Great respect for the expertise of the late Austin J. Maher (his boss and mentor at Singer-Kearfott) led to Hacken’s minimal resistance in joining Maher and the Council of Defense And Space Industries (CODSIA) government industry group in the collective creation of DoD-Std-2167, Defense System Software Development, which is fairly characterized as one of the precursors of the Capability-Maturity Model (CMM). This was a most natural segue, seven years later, into the job as CMM process lead in the company’s GEC-Marconi incarnation.

Seven years ago, Hacken started his current job as Senior Director of Vital [a.k.a. Safety-Critical] Systems Integrity at MTA/New York City Transit, where formal methods are being applied in the design, certification, and implementation of processor-based train control technologies. A most rewarding part of his job is the creation and execution of an in-house safety-critical systems design and certification course. He is, in addition to being an ACM and IEEE member, greatly informed by membership in the New York Academy of Sciences, Sigma Xi, and the American Mathematical Society.

By the way, he was born in Kazakhstan, but that’s another story.

 
 
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- 10 of 16 reviews

   
   Simple type theory: a practical logic for expressing and reasoning about mathematical ideas
Farmer W., BIRKHAUSER, Basel, Switzerland, 2023. 312 pp.  Type: Book (3031211138)

What has evolved from the famous century-old (Bertrand) Russell paradox and Russell’s consequent theory of types needs, in my opinion, all the useful elaboration, clarification, explication, and explanation that it can get. Any nontrivial ex...

Feb 16 2024  
   A first journey through logic
Hils M., Loeser F., AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY, Providence, RI, 2019. 185 pp.  Type: Book (978-1-470452-72-8)

I have, for years and to largely underwhelmed ears, preached without portfolio the risk of treating connotation as denotation. So “first journey” in this book’s title indicated, to me, a not-especially-deep ...

Aug 24 2022  
   Bits and bugs: a scientific and historical review of software failures in computational science
Huckle T., Neckel T., Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA, 2019. 251 pp.  Type: Book (978-1-611975-55-0)

Niels Bohr, in confronting the subtleties and paradoxes of quantum theory, said to one of his many famous students and acolytes, “These issues are so serious that one can only joke about them” [1]. The vernacular ma...

Nov 20 2019  
  An open door to number theory
Campbell D., AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY, Washington, DC, 2018. 283 pp.  Type: Book (978-1-470443-48-1)

In 1993, my daughter showed me the New York Times article that announced Andrew Wiles’s 100-plus-page proof (to be successfully corrected two years later) of Fermat’s last theorem (FLT) [1]. Wiles’s...

Feb 19 2019  
  Mathematics without apologies: portrait of a problematic vocation
Harris M., Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2015. 464 pp.  Type: Book (978-0-691154-23-7)

A long time ago, a friend and fellow undergraduate math major said of a world-famous professor at our university, “He doesn’t teach you any math; he teaches you what it means to be a mathematician.” The en...

Jun 5 2017  
  Elements of mathematics: from Euclid to Gödel
Stillwell J., Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2016. 440 pp.  Type: Book (978-0-691171-68-5)

Stillwell, the author of this exceptional work, states: “This book grew from an article I wrote in 2008 for the centenary of Felix Klein’s Elementary mathematics from an advanced standpoint” [1], an...

Feb 28 2017  
   Computer science: an interdisciplinary approach
Sedgewick R., Wayne K., Addison-Wesley Professional, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2016. 1168 pp.  Type: Book (978-0-134076-42-3), Reviews: (2 of 2)

I’ve decided to say here at the beginning that this book is outstanding and that it has my highest recommendation, both for self-study and as a text for undergraduate students who are serious about computing. The bookR...

Dec 2 2016  
   MATHEON: mathematics for key technologies
Deuflhard P., Grötschel M., Hömberg D., Horst U., Kramer J., Mehrmann V., Polthier K., Schmidt F., Schütte C., Skutella M., Sprekels J., European Mathematical Society, Zurich, Switzerland, 2014. 466 pp.  Type: Book (978-3-037191-37-8)

World-famous mathematician G. H. Hardy took public pride in touting the purity of pure mathematics [1,2] and in deprecating applied mathematics as “ugly” and second rate. That Hardy was, as the phrase goes, R...

Feb 12 2015  
   The R book (2nd ed.)
Crawley M., Wiley Publishing, Chichester, UK, 2013. 1076 pp.  Type: Book (978-0-470973-92-9), Reviews: (2 of 2)

I continue to not be a statistician but rather a proverbial user of statistics, and therefore (at the risk of self-flattery) a dangerous person. Like many others in science, I was forced (in my case, a half century ago, and of course w...

Aug 7 2014  
   Mathematics and climate
Kaper H., Engler H., Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA, 2013. 317 pp.  Type: Book (978-1-611972-60-3)

A Nobel laureate warned me, some time ago, to be on the alert for the stage at which “your mathematics departs the physics.” Because physics and chemistry underlie climate science, mathematics plays, to say the leas...

Mar 5 2014  
 
 
 
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