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SUMMARY:A Computing Project that has been running for 50 years - Dr Arthur
  Norman
DTSTART:20150308T100000Z
DTEND:20150308T104500Z
UID:TALK58312@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:George Fortune
DESCRIPTION:Often when people think about Computer Science they will imagi
 ne that everything is very new and constantly changing. Well in some sense
  one of the key features of the subject is that rapid change\, but it can 
 also come as a surprise to find that there can be projects that have been 
 successful enough that they last for a seriously long time and there is st
 ill more to do. The one I know about is called "Reduce" and is a system th
 at performs algebra - in the sense that it does symbolic integration and d
 ifferentiation and the other sorts of mathematical things that are part of
  what every scientist needs to do every day. It was started by Tony Hearn\
 , whose PhD was in Theoretical Physics here at Trinity. Onwards from that 
 he decided that some of the tedious calculations associated with Feynman D
 iagrams he was interested in might be done better by computer than by hand
 . The program he started expanded and became a general purpose symbolic al
 gebra system and gradually others join in the work of developing\, maintai
 ning and distributing it. I find it is now rather over 40 years ago that I
  first got involved - and computers have changed a lot over the intervenin
 g years. Around a decade ago Hearn released Reduce so all its sources are 
 now freely available to anybody\, and a collection of us support it via it
 s web-site at sourceforge. As well as being old Reduce is now quite sizabl
 e and the sourceforge site currently hosts the roughly 2.5 million of line
 s of source code involved.\nI will talk about some of the joys and challen
 ges working with something that has so much history\, that has contributio
 ns from pretty well all around the world and that is large enough that no 
 one individual can understand it all. It you end up as a research Computer
  Scientist you may\, if incautious\, eventually find yourself faced with t
 he same sorts of challenge.\n
LOCATION:Winstanley Lecture Theatre
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