Jim Brown

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James Arthur Brown is an APL language designer and the primary force behind IBM's APL2. In this role he was one of the primary advocates for the nested array model. He was awarded the Iverson Award in 1993 for his work on APL2.

Brown studied mathematics at Gannon College in Pennsylvania[1] (he first used a computer there in 1958). After graduating, he took a position at IBM Federal Systems in 1965, and soon learned about APL and its use in Falkoff and Iverson's "A formal description of SYSTEM/360".[2] Brown later (at an ACM meeting) met Adin Falkoff, who demonstrated APL\360 to him on a 2741 terminal. Although Brown's manager declined to make him an account on the Yorktown Heights installation Falkoff had connected to, Brown learned of a planned installation at Syracuse University and enrolled in Ph.D. studies there in 1968. He would graduate in 1971 having written (advised by Garth Foster) "A Generalization of APL" for his thesis—the document that later became the foundation of APL2 and an influence on NARS. However, he had left his IBM position to begin studies, and the pay for his new job running Syracuse's APL service pay proved insufficient, so in 1969 Brown also began work at IBM's Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights. In addition to APL implementation such as extending Encode, Decode, and Catenate to higher-rank arrays, Brown discussed language designs with his colleagues and in particular Trenchard More, whose array theory closely resembled Brown's ideas. However, Brown was not allowed at the time to access More's proposals made at IBM in order to avoid their content being made public.[3]

Brown left IBM in 1996 and began working as an independent consultant. He and James Wheeler, a former manager at STSC, founded the analytics company SmartArrays in 1999.[4] Brown remained a manager at SmartArrays until its dissolution in 2019.[5]

Publications

APL conferences

Main article: APL conference

Other talks

External links

References

  1. ↑ Jim Brown. APL Wiki user page
  2. ↑ Adin Falkoff, Ken Iverson, and Edward H. Sussenguth Jr. "A Formal Description of System/360". IBM Systems Journal 3:3:198-262. 1964.
  3. ↑ Jim Brown. A Personal History of APL. Updated 2017-04-05.
  4. ↑ SmartArrays. "About Us". Archived from the original on 2018-05-17.
  5. ↑ smartarrays.com. Accessed 2020-03-17.
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