The work of George Forsythe and his students

into one of the truly outstanding Departments of Computer Science anywhere, a position it has continued to hold. George died very suddenly of cancer in the Spring of 1972. His untimely death was a shock to all his many colleagues and friends, and resulted in several memorials and dedications: an article in the a special Stanford memorial resolution by Harriot et al., available from the Stanford archives; and a special issue of the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis (April 1973), with a dedication by Alston Householder. Moreover, when a new building to house the Computation Centre was built in 1980, it was named after him. Two national awards bear his name: the ACM undergraduate paper competition, and the SIGNUM memorial lecturer award for leadership in numerical mathematics, 3. His Research George's early interest in scientific computation was fostered by the meteorological problems he was involved with during the War. Then while at NBS, he interacted with many of the early pioneers in scientific computation, when this group was coming to grips with the intricacies of basic floating-point computation. His early work on the numerical solution of partial differential equations culminated in his 1960 book with Wasow, Finite Difference Methods for Partial Differential Equations. This book remained a standard in the field for many years. He also made contributions to the use of orthogonal polynomials in scientific computation and to our understanding of various aspects of the solution of linear systems. Two other textbooks remain in use today: He was instrumental in pointing out the significance of finite arithmetic in the computational solution of fundamental mathematical problems-his article Pitfalls in Computation, published in the American Math. Monthly in 1970, for example, is still an excellent source of instructional material on the subject.