Joseph F. Traub

Joseph Frederick Traub (June 24, 1932 to August 24, 2015) was an American computer scientist, the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He held positions at Bell Laboratories, the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon and Columbia, with sabbaticals at Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Caltech and the Technical University of Munich. He was the author or editor of ten monographs and roughly 120 papers. In 1959 he began work on optimal iteration theory, culminating in his 1964 monograph Iterative Methods for the Solution of Equations, and he later pioneered work with Henryk Wozniakowski on computational complexity applied to continuous scientific problems, known as information-based complexity. He collaborated on significant algorithms including the Jenkins-Traub algorithm for polynomial zeros and the Shaw-Traub, Kung-Traub and Brent-Traub algorithms. From 1971 to 1979 he headed the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon, and from 1979 to 1989 he was founding chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia.