Ken Kennedy

Ken Kennedy, who lived from August 12, 1945 to February 7, 2007, was an American computer scientist and professor at Rice University, where he was founding chairman of the Computer Science Department. He directed the construction of software systems for programming parallel computers, including an automatic vectorizer for Fortran 77, compilers for Fortran 90 and High Performance Fortran, and a compilation system based on the MATLAB numerical computing environment. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1990, named a Fellow of the AAAS in 1994 and of the ACM and IEEE in 1995, received the IEEE Computer Society's 1995 W. W. McDowell Award, co-chaired the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee from 1997 to 1999, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.