Bill Paxton
Senior Fellow in Computational AstrophysicsKavli Institute for Theoretical Physics
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone: (805) 893-6352
E-mail: paxton@kitp.ucsb.edu
Links to Other Stuff
• Tioga: Plotting using Ruby, PDF, and TeX
• MESA: Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics
• EZ: Do It Yourself Stellar Evolution
• Library of EZ Star Plots
• A Few Stellar Links
Biographical Sketch
My academic and career background is in Computer Science. While I was in graduate school, I worked with Doug Engelbart at SRI where he and his group were busy inventing personal computing. As soon as I got my "union card" from Stanford (Ph.D., 1977), I went to work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where they were busy inventing new technologies like Ethernet, networked personal computers, bitmap displays, graphical user-interfaces, and laser printers. Two of my colleagues at PARC, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, eventually left to form Adobe Systems. I joined them soon after (1983), in time to help create the original PostScript technology and later become one of the Adobe recipients of the ACM's Software System Award (1989) for PostScript's design and implementation (among other things, I did the Type 1 font algorithms starting from some great ideas of John's).
Thanks to Adobe I've been ''retired'' since 1990, and now I'm having fun being an unofficial scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). The people at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP), Lars Bildsten in particular, have been most welcoming and tolerant of my eccentricities. The stellar evolution program EZ is a spin-off from a project with Lars. Since a physicist can do "astro-physics", I imagine a Computer Scientist can do "astro-computing" or perhaps even "computational-astro-physics". That seems to be a good description of what I'm up to these days, and I'm having a great time! But if I do happen to have a bad day, I can always turn to Calvin for inspiration.
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
