William Kahan
William Kahan · Technology & Engineering
Architect of IEEE floating-point arithmetic; Turing Award laureate.
1933, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Canada · United States (Berkeley)
William Kahan is recognized among Jewish contributors to Technology & Engineering — Architect of IEEE floating-point arithmetic; Turing Award laureate.
Kahan led the design of the IEEE 754 standard for floating-point arithmetic in 1985, imposing rigorous handling of rounding, exceptions and edge cases that made numerical computing reliable across all modern hardware. A mathematician of Jewish background from Toronto, he spent his career at the University of California, Berkeley and received the 1989 Turing Award. His work underlies virtually every scientific and engineering calculation done by computer today.
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Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Computer Science
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Architect of IEEE floating-point arithmetic; Turing Award laureate.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Computer Science
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