Addional Topics for Charlie

Background: Born May 15, 1943 in Philadelphia PA in WW2 when 
Dad was completing his doctorate in Theology at Temple Univ. after 
completing his Masters in Theology from Princeton. Mom worked
up to the last few weeks before I was born as a RN at a nearby hospital.
Both hailed from MN border towns: Dad Emmons on MN-Iowa border
& mom Ferryville on the Mississippi River near WI-MN-IA border.

Dad’s ancestors came from Telemark & Mom’s from South Norway,
so DNA tests & genealogy show my ancestry as 100 Norwegian.
Dad’s father Ole spoke Norsk & English & was a minister in the
Norwegian Lutheran Church in America. He went to Oregon State
in Agriculture 1 year (& played football) before transferring to St Olaf
College in Minnesota where he majored in Theology to attend Luther 
Seminary upon Graduation in 1905. Mom’s father Ole farmed in WI 
after immigrating to the US with his parents when 1 year old. Ole’s
father was a carpenter who built many churches, farmhouses & barns
in Crawford County WI. 

Many expected me to go into the ministry like my Grandpa & Dad
BUT my mentor was my Uncle Bardolf (Shakespeare character) who
graduated in Electrical Engineering from MIT following his BA in Physics
from St. Olaf College, where my Dad & uncle Paul (MD from Ulniv of MN
also graduated.

After his Doctorate, dad took a joint position as Lutheran pastor + 
Seminary professor in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada where we 
moved when I was 2 years old. Dad helped grow the small mission 
congregation of a dozen
families to a large church which hosted the International Luther League 
Convention in 1949. He also led building a new Lutheran seminary merging 
German & Norwegian Lutherans. (The “Bishop’s Boys” describes how Milton 
Wright gave his sons Orville & Wilbuhr a strong sense of purpose in Life & 
solid ethics which I felt akin to when I read it).

Growing up
Saskatoon’s a great place to grow up especially with the new Brunskill 
School, an experimental school associated with the University of Sask.
We had Univ Profs & students bring in projects & demonstrations in our
classrooms such as a working car engine model, electricity demos & an
inspiring 7th Grade Aussie teacher Dr. Kratzman who inspired singer Joni
Mitchel, also from Saskatoon & great dancer with my friend Bob at the Y
altho our family banned dancing, alcohol & cigarettes.  I had great friends. 
Dad led Saskatoon’s Ministerial Society (local ministers, priests & rabbis)
and arranged for me to attend local Hebrew class at the synagogue with
my Jewish classmates, altho I didn’t last long as I preferred baseball,
hockey & basketball. I also took some Greek one summer with Seminary
Students, but altho Dad was a great teacher, my interest was Science & Math. 
Dad was a Chemistry major at St Olaf College & had an assistantship to 
pursue a masters in Chemistry at Iowa State Univ but decided to go to 
Seminary instead when his mom died a lingering death his Senior year.  

Dad took me fishing with other professors & visiting US dignitaries to 
Lac La Range & Meadow Lake as far north as roads extended north in
this days where we visited Indian villages & small communities of emigrants.

Why engineer:
Dad’s Dad (& other MN-IA-ND pastors) built lakeside summer cabins in 1917 
on a strip of land between Ottertail & WalkerLakes called Camp Nidaros,
a reminder of Norway where they all had their Heritage. 
After MIT, my mentor, uncle Bar joined Allis Chalmers in Milwaukee WI where 
he helped design & build Big Allis the largest transformer in it’s day to
power NYC.  He then worked on the WW2 Manhattan project with Nobel Laureate 
Ernest Lawrence to design & build the 1024 calutrons to separate Uranium 235 & 
238 at Y-12 in Oak Ridge to fuel the Little Boy bomb which with Fat Man causing 
Japan to surrender, ending WW2 to bring PEACE. I am now one of 3 official ORNL 
Tour Guides + serve as AMSE Museum DOE Bus Tour Guide to ORNL,Y12 & K25.

Being inspired by uncle Bar, I excelled & loved Science & Math in High
Schools in Saskatoon & Scotland where I took Physics & Chemistry from
inspiring Doc Wilson who taught both. Another student in those days went
on from our Boroughmuir HS in Edinburgh to Win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  
My year in Scotland was a great motivator with Doc Wilson (ask me when he 
gave me the strap for a physics homework problem) but I managed to excel in 
science & math while simultaneously excelling in basketball both on Edinburgh’s 
winning Schoolboy team & selected for Scotland’s National BB Team to compete 
in an International Tournament vs. England, Ireland & Wales at the USAF Base in 
Ruislip near London - a great binding experience with my Scottish Schoolmates. 
My closest Boroughmuir classmates & lifetime friend went on to work at NASA 
Ames but is now back in London but we’re in the 
Zoom book group so see him weekly.

Another mentor Dr. Carl Bailey, Physics Professor & Concordia College Dean
inspired & cultivated my Science & Engineering bent as he also worked on the 
Manhattan Project with Richard Feynman, Physics Nobel Laureate.  

Prof. Arne Garness & Chuck Heuer added a Fortran Compiler to Concordia’s IBM 
1130 Business computer so a handful of us Physics & Math Seniors could explore 
algorithms during evenings, my 1st start in computing. Mom’s brother was also a 
Lutheran pastor in the church near Concordia College.  Later I received Concordia’s 
Alumni Achievement Award as well as inducted to Concordia Mathematics Hall of 
Fame. I can relate an inspiring story of Bar doing “magic” at our Lake Cabin to get 
fishing worms.

After ’64 Concordia Graduation with 3 majors: Physics, Math, French
Offers 
1. Peace Corps in Ghana to teach HS physics & train in PR (declined)
2. Luther Seminary - low Bible test score (declined = “message from God”)
3. Grad schools UM USD ISU New Hampshire UK & others USD 1st to offer 
assistantship but other assistantships came later
4. Honeywell to optimize kill ratios in Vietnam War (declined)
5. Sperry Univac: build compact computers for Navy Subs & ships (declined)
6. US Navy Officer Candidate School (declined)

Other trivia:
1. I borrowed ZERO $ from my parents but funded all my education by an
NDEA no interest loan at Concordia (Paid back with my 1st NASA paycheck)
plus teaching assistantships & instructor income at USD & NC State.
2, I was a paperboy with a daily route of 125 evening paper after school.
3. Our family Summered @Ottertail Cabin & mom’s WI farm w US cousins
4. My USD advisor knew NCSU Dean Menius & helped me get assistantship 5. 
USD Advisor Dr. Frick & Dean Gutzman were top notch numerical analysts 
who just came from US Navy Dahlgren facility the year I came to USD (lucky).

6. At Concordia, loved physics & also on hockey team defense, physics lab 
asst, photo editor, had library job,  Chi Delt, Society, debate altho 1 yr younger 
than classmates with just 2 years of HS.  USNA alternate 2x but invited to give 
USNA lecture on supercomputing to senior midshipmen.

7. Had strong sense of mission in life growing up in parsonage but had fun
 hitchhiked 800 miles to lake cabin with “recommended” friend

8. By serendipidy PhD advisor worked summers for Bob Fulton at Langley as 
well as summers at ORNL where I eventually spent my 2 careers: 35yrs at LaRC 
plus 7 at ORNL & several more a on top secret project related to supercomputers 
& our nations nuclear codes (loved the R&D & wrote papers but only top secret 
cleared could read them).  Even top 5 at ORNL  Directors had to take special 
departmental security training in addition to their top secret clearance to hear my 
talk at USEC. President’s science advisor from Princeton was on our USEC board.

9. Afternoon of my thesis defense, NASA LARC was interviewing at NCSU-Ed 
Cortright was new director & staffing up his baby, the Viking Project & while 
@NCSU interviewed me at end of day as all prior slots were full (he stayed)

10.Also Celanese, Deering Millikan, Firestone, 2 colleges & USAF offered pilot 
training positions (Had flight physical at Seymour Johnson AFB & orders to 
Report to Lackland in 2 weeks but eventually joined NASA.

11. Joined Bob Fulton’s Automated Methods Branch in CSM branch of the SD 
at LaRC in 1970  to evaluate FE methods: MD force vs Boeing displacement 
methods. Had in-house code for comparison from Senol Utku. Recommended 
Boeing Displacement which let to NASTRAN Development by MSC

12. Used NASTRAN for static, dynamic & Frequency Response of Viking Lander 
& some of Orbiter on the Viking Project for Dick Snyder’s Structures group with 
Mel Anderson, Jim Robinson, Tom Jones, Bob Wingate, Nate ? & others.

13. We had priority runs on new CDC 6600 supercomputers for Structural analysis 
plus our “Tiger Team” redesign with Jim Robinson of GCMS box

14. After challenger disaster, met challenge to  speed SRB redesign calculations 
from hours to seconds & awarded Cray’s 1st Gigaflop award in 1989 at the 2nd 
Supercomputing Conf in Reno recognized at Cray banquet.  
15. Secret: Used FORCE (Fortran for Cincurrent execution developed by wizard 
Harry Jordan of U of Colorado who had a grant with me. Also had grants for 
structural equation solution Duke, UVA, ODU plus projects with Boeing  & IPAD 
involving leaders in aerospace & computer science.
 
16. Our NASA solvers were recognized as fastest in the world as well as a relational 
data base system developed for shuttle tiles by Gary Giles & were some of the most
popular software requested by American industry for a wide variety of innovative 
applications (e.g.  design of America’s cup, missile design auto crash dynamics). 

17. The other day I was noticed the shinny glimmering surface of a new car which 
reminded me of when competing GM & Ford both got our NASA equation solution 
software to optimize automobile surfaces, something I had no appreciation of 
when developing our equation solver. 

18. In early Arpanet days I worked with W&M professor Carl Anderson to do 
automatic differentiation & integration using macsyma @MIT (Now MathWorks) 
to compute more accurate terms in our finite element analysis codes. 

19. I issued an “internet challenge” to solve 10 large scale structures applications 
we compared with our GPS (General Purpise Solver) . Few even came close to our 
NASA solvers, but the interest caused us to nbe swamped with requests from US 
industry, but unfortunately also some from outside the US. As it was a FEDD (For 
Early Domestic Dissemination) we worked with Legal to embed our code  to give 
us feedback on the size of problems being solved by who & where clearly informing 
users it was included as part of their evaluation. As a byproduct we could see the
character of problems being solved as well as screen out unauthorized use altho 
some foreign sites tried to use US collaborators to get access.

20. Noted NASA Scientists who went to DOE:
a. Bob Ward: When I 1st arrived in my new ORNL Office, Dr Richard Barrett
next door (now at Sandia) said I had much in common with Bob. Bob had left
Langley from ACD to start up ORNL’s Computer Science effort patterned after 
NASA’s success at the time albeit Bob to a similar path I did in parallel computing 
as a future alternative to “big iron”.  Seymour Cray used to promote the idea of 
chickens  vs elephants: Its too difficult to control a flock of chickens (microprocessors) 
compared to a few elephants (big expensive Cray Supercomputers). Bob & I took the 
approach albeit difficult to harness inexpensive processors (e.g. our Finite Element 
Machine) and Bob Ward did likewise at ORNL while hiring young experts Jack Dongarra, 
Al Geist and several others to eventually surpass the “big iron” so today all 
Supercomputers have 10s or hundreds or even more processors, including our new 
HPE-Cray Frontier Supercomputer, #1 in the World.
  
b. A close colleague Horst Simon who I met when he was a lowly Ames contractor 
rose within NASA but switched to DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley Nat’l Lab eventually 
rising to become Associate Director of LBL. In the early days, I invited him to give 
a talk at Langley. He didn’t care for the hotel I’d arranged for him, so invited him to 
stay in our Norfolk waterside home where I got to know him quite well hosting his 
visit. As I mention in many of my talks, I consider NASA my main course and ORNL
 dessert. I condider myself indeed fortunate to have worked at 2 of the best & most 
stimulating research environments in the world.