Kenan Professor of Computer Science
Fred Brooks, winner of the 1995 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in
Science, started the UNC-CH Computer Science Department in 1964 and
was its chair for 20 years. Photo by Will Owens.
Kenan Professor of Computer Science
Fred Brooks, winner of the 1995 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in
Science, started the UNC-CH Computer Science Department in 1964 and
was its chair for 20 years. Photo by Will Owens.
In February, Frederick J. Brooks, Kenan Professor of Computer Science, received the 1995 Bower Award for Achievement in Science, bestowed annually by the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, on an individual "whose contributions to science reflect the kind of genius of Benjamin Franklin himself." The Bower Award is an international award and one of the most prestigious in science. It carries with it a $250,000 prize, the richest science award offered by an American sponsor. Here is a glimpse of the man and his career.
In 1965, Fred Brooks heard a computer scientist, Ivan Sutherland, speak on the future of computer graphics. "Think of the screen as a window into a virtual world," Sutherland said. "The task of computer-graphics research is to make the picture in the window look real, sound real, interact real, feel real." When he heard that, Brooks took notice.
"I had never thought about a screen that way before," Brooks says. "I knew instantly that he was right. It seemed to me to be exactly where the frontier was."
He doesn't strike you as a frontiersman. Reclining in his pinstripe suit opposite a tall bookshelf in his office, he runs a hand absentmindedly through his white hair. He thinks carefully before answering questions, fiddles with a rubber band, speaks at the unhurried pace of Sunday afternoon on the front porch.
He explains that leaving a job at IBM to come to UNC-CH in 1964 was, in a way, a kind of homecoming. He was born at Duke Hospital in Durham, the son of a UNC-CH chemistry professor. During his childhood in Greenville, North Carolina, he fiddled with gadgets, figuring out what they were good for. At age 13, he read in a magazine about Harvard's experimental Mark I computer. He began reading everything he could find on the subject.
Undergraduate work in physics and math at Duke University led to a master's and a Ph.D. at Harvard. (The field was called "applied mathematics;" it was really computer science.) There Brooks did his dissertation work under Howard Aiken, the designer of the Mark I computer. Aiken convinced Brooks to design a computer for business applications, a new idea at the time, and Brooks' design helped him land a job with IBM.
Brooks' connection with IBM led to an unusual claim to fame: lower-case letters. When most scientists were thinking of computers as tools for science and engineering, Brooks' conviction that computers would one day be used in the business world drove him to make computers capable of understanding the difference between the alphabet's upper and lower case.
Brooks also led the team that developed the IBM System/360, the first line of differently sized computers that had the ability to share software. His partner, Gerrit Blaauw, now professor emeritus at Twente Technical University, Enschede (the Netherlands), became a lifelong colleague and friend.
As Brooks and his wife Nancy began attending church with the Blaauws, he found his goals suddenly changing. "When you become a Christian," he says, "now you're working for a different boss." Though leaving IBM meant taking a lower salary and lugging their household from Poughkeepsie, New York, back to Chapel Hill, he felt led to UNC-CH in a way that he says felt "almost supernatural."
Today, his office is crowded with boxes full of his book The Mythical Man-Month, a classic well-known to most everyone who's studied computers. Its newest edition appeared last July. Brooks' essays on software engineering are written the way he talks: direct, down-to-earth language rich with colloquialisms and visual images. The substance is sophisticated, but the approach is easy, accessible.
Professor Steve Weiss, who became department chair in 1989, says that Brooks' drive for excellence stems both from enthusiasm about the work and a good balance of creativity and persistence. When Brooks and his wife were first married, he says, they moved into an upstairs apartment. They had a grand piano and weren't sure they could get it up the stairs. Brooks made a full-size, cardboard model of the grand piano, took it to the stairwell, and experimented until he'd figured out exactly how to get it into the apartment. When the time came to move the furniture, the moving men said there was no way to do it. Brooks replied, "Sure there is, you just do this," and showed them. And up it went.
"He's like that," Weiss says. "He's having fun. To hear him talk about his work, you'd think he was a guy with some game he was playing. Research, to him, is a great adventure."
Despite his 64 years, Brooks looks ready to remain on the scientific cutting edge for a long time yet. And his students have adopted his problem-solving approach and are passing it on. He could retire with faith that the program is in good hands.
But don't count on him doing it. "You never finish teaching," he says. "You may run out of ability to do any more of it, but you never finish it."
His smile quickly fades when he is asked a question about the most enjoyable part of the job. Gravely, he answers with something akin to reverence.
"Seeing the students grow into leaders in the field-people you admire and are glad to be around. It's the same as child-raising." A long silence.
In teaching or technology, he says, it's not the tools that are most important. "Helping anybody grow is really the rewarding part of the work. The technical work we do will be superseded. The people work we do will not."
Last modified: 5/20/96