D.J. Scalapino

I first heard of Glen Culler when I began my postdoctoral work in 1963 with Bob Schrieffer at the University of Pennsylvania. We were trying to understand the tunneling I(V) characteristics of a superconducting tunnel junction. This eventually involved solving a set of coupled nonlinear integral equations and appeared quite formidable. Bob said there was a man at TRW named Glen Culler who had put together a new on-line computing facility that could solve it. Bob flew out to the West Coast and in two days came back with the solution! Glen's machine had done the job.

It was some five years later, in 1968, when I joined the UCSB faculty that I got to know Glen and use the remarkable Culler-Fried on-line system he put together at UCSB. I must say that Glen's style of attacking a problem was what I found so impressive. Like a painter or a sculptor he would sit at the keyboard making the solution up as he went along. What I found so special about this was that one could see on the screen what was happening as the pieces of the calculation were being put together. I have never felt that way about computing since, and I believe I was the last user of Glen's marvelous machine on our campus.

Then some time passed when I didn't see Glen, but shortly after the ITP was formed, we invited Glen to come over. He gave a marvelous lecture on computation. We had at the Institute some outstanding young theoretical physics postdoctoral fellows, John Richardson, Bob Pearson, and Doug Toussaint, who were working on problems in statis-tical mechanics and elementary particles. After Glen's seminar, they visited with him, and he challenged them with a problem: could they make a program that would solve the Rubix Cube problem. The Rubix Cube was an array of small colored cubes somehow attached together into a larger cube such that one could turn one and then another, trying to get all one color on each face of the large cube. It had some aspects of the protein folding problem. Typical of Glen's style, he had created a puzzle that these three worked on night and day for several weeks to show Glen what they could do: they actually developed a guided Monte Carlo routine that did pretty well, and eventually two of them went to work for Glen on the Array Processor and its descendents.

Glen is a unique scientist, who developed entirely new ways of doing things, but what I most admire is his style of solving problems, posing problems and in so doing, teaching us all how to do it. Thanks, Glen.

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