Pat Holmes Sterbenz

Pat Holmes Sterbenz (July 30, 1927 – July 26, 2008) was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He worked at IBM and later was a professor of computer and information science at Brooklyn College. He is best known for his textbook Floating-Point Computation (1974), one of the first systematic treatments of floating-point arithmetic, and for the Sterbenz lemma named after him, which states conditions under which floating-point subtraction is exact.

Life

Sterbenz was born in Ohio on July 30, 1927. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, where he met Nancy Norton, whom he married in 1949; the couple had five children.