Keynote Speaker - 2: How I Became a Computational Scientist

Professional journal advertisements, email newsletters, and university marketing now advertise numerous educational and research programs in computational physics, computational biology, and other fields where computation is an essential element of the discipline. These programs all have very recent origins, made possible by the exponential growth in the availability of compute power. In this presentation, I describe some milestones in my own experience as a person living through and participating in the birth of computational science - especially the contributions of computing to scientific theory and understanding. I began my history with analog computing, learned numerical methods by manual computations of derivatives and integrals, learned to program an early vacuum tube computer, and experienced challenges in finding acceptance for computer methods in traditional biomedical disciplines.