Short Biography

David W. Matula received the Ph.D. (’66) in engineering science from the University of California, Berkeley, following a B.S. (’59) in engineering physics from Washington University, St. Louis. Since 1974 he has served as Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at SMU. He has held visiting research and teaching positions at UT Austin (’73), the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School (’78), and Stanford (’80) in the U.S; in Karlsruhe (’74) Frankfurt (’86), and Dresden (’98) in Germany; in Aarhus (’80) and Odense (’89-’90) in Denmark; and in Lyon (’99), France.

His research focuses on the foundations and applications of algorithm engineering with specific emphasis on computer arithmetic and graph/network algorithms. He has published over one hundred archival publications. Two-thirds of his publications focus on computer arithmetic and have appeared primarily in the IEEE and computer science literature. Dr. Matula was the keynote speaker for the 16^th IEEE ARITH Symposia (’03), and has been involved in organizing the IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic since 1975. His computer arithmetic research has been supported for several decades by federal, state, and corporate agencies, including NSF, Texas ATP, T.I., Cyrix, and the Semiconductor Research Corporation.

Professor Matula’s publications on graph algorithms have appeared in a variety of mathematical and scientific journals including J. Chem. Physics, J. Am. Chem. Soc., Comp. and Biomedical Res., and Geographical Analysis. He is a founding editorial board member of Random Structures and Algorithms, the ORSA Journal on Computing and the Journal of Classification.

As a consultant Dr. Matula has participated in the design of floating point units for microprocessors with Cyrix (’88-’97), National Semiconductor (’97-’03), and AMD (’03-current). He was a co-designer of the Cyrix FasMath coprocessors, and the one-watt Geode (x-86 compatible) processor introduced by N.S.M. in 2003 and now available from AMD. He has consulted for industry on intellectual property and served on SMU’s intellectual property committee for eleven years. Dr. Matula holds 14 U.S. Patents and has 5 applications pending. In the past ten years, five of his Ph. D. students have experienced being co-inventors on these patents and pending applications.