Marvin Stein

Marvin Stein (1924-2015) was an American mathematician and computer scientist, and the "father of computer science" at the University of Minnesota.

Early life Marvin Stein was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1924 to Russian-Jewish immigrants. The family later moved to Los Angeles, California to treat Stein's mother's tuberculosis. He graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in 1941, and immediately entered University of California, Los Angeles. His studies were interrupted and in 1942 he served in the US Army Signal Corps as a tabulating machine operator, and had a short stint working at IBM. He returned to school after the war and graduated from UCLA in 1947.

Stein did his Ph.D. at the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA (or INA, an ancestor of UCLA's computer science department), where in the summer of 1949 he participated in a seminar on solving linear equations and finding eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices with several other future luminaries of the domain, including Magnus Hestenes, J. Barkley Rosser, George Forsythe, Cornelius Lanczos, Gertrude Blanch, and William Karush. Magnus Hestenes's work on the conjugate gradient method was a direct outgrowth of this group's work together over the summer. High speed computers were not available yet, so numerical experiments to test theoretical results were performed by hand by Stein and other researchers. Stein in particular studied Rayleigh–Ritz methods of variational problems.

After earning his Ph.D. from the INA in January 1951, Stein was hired as a senior research engineer by aircraft manufacturer Convair in southern California. He primarily worked on missile simulations for the SM-65 Atlas,

Stein lost his job with Convair when his security clearance was revoked by the House Un-American Activities Committee on account of Stein's Jewish heritage. It was later re-instated, but Stein had already decided to move on. The UNIVAC 1103 was around 60 feet long, 30 feet wide, and weighed over 17 tons.

Stein taught the first University of Minnesota courses on high-speed computation and played a singular role in developing the university's path to computer science education. In 1958, Stein was made the head of the university's Numerical Analysis Center at the Institute of Technology (later the University Computer Center), for which the university purchased its own 1103 at a discounted price of $250,000. The center was also home to a REAC 100.

In 1967, Stein created - with William Munro, Neal Amundson, and Hans Weinberger - the university's graduate program in Computer and Information Sciences. Three years later, in 1970, Stein was a key player in the establishment of Computer Science as a full fledged academic department at the university. He stepped down the following year, and served as a professor in the department until his retirement in 1997. It was well reviewed in its time, and in 2017, more than five decades after its publication, it was still in print in its third edition. It was written with the intention to provide instruction in assembly language programming to both professional programmers and highly technical laypersons. Much of the book was originally designed around the CDC 1604 and the Fortran language.