We are continuing our historical session of speakers who have been observing and shaping the early history of the conjugate gradient method.
Our third speaker needs perhaps an introduction to the non-Swiss participants. Prof. Urs Hochstrasser was one of the early students of Prof. Stiefel, and, moreover, he was one who wrote his thesis mainly about applications of the conjugate gradient method, as you will hear. In addition, he was present at the INA at UCLA while Hestenes and Stiefel wrote their joint paper. He later continued a very interesting career of his own.
He got his Ph.D. (Dr. sc. math.} here at ETH in 1954. Then, he first went back to the USA to work as a ``guest worker'' again at the National Bureau of Standards and as an assistant professor at the American University in Washington, D.C. In 1957, he became the director of the Computer Center and an associate professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. In Fall 1958 he got a leave of absence and started to work for the Swiss Embassies in Washington and Ottawa. In Spring 1961 he decided to move away from a purely academic career and to move back to Switzerland, where he worked in Berne for the Swiss government, first as the delegate for nuclear energy. In Spring 1969 he became the highest ranking Swiss official for science policy, director of what was called ``Bundesamt für Bildung und Wissenschaft''. In this function he was preparing, for example, a very important federal bill that provided more than 200 million Swiss francs for computing equipment on different levels here in Switzerland, including 40 million francs for a Swiss national supercomputer that was later installed in Manno, in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. I think I should add that it was not his idea to put it there, as this choice has been very controversial.
Urs Hochstrasser has also been a ``Titularprofessor'' at ETH Zurich and a ``Honorarprofessor'' at the University of Berne, positions comparable to an adjunct professorship in the USA. At both places he has been teaching courses on numerical and applied mathematics for many years.
I would now like to give the word to Professor Hochstrasser to present his account.