American computer scientist (1935–2019)
Kenneth Edward Batcher (December 27, 1935 – August 22, 2019) was an American academic who was emeritus professor of Computer Science at Kent State University. He also worked as a computer architect at Goodyear Aerospace in Akron, Ohio for 28 years.
Background.
Kenneth Edward Batcher was born on December 27, 1935 in Queens, New York, to Lois and Ralph Batcher. His parents met at Iowa State University and later relocated to New York City after graduation. His father, Ralph R. Batcher, was the Chief Engineer of The A. H. Grebe Radio Company until its bankruptcy in 1932.
Batcher graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School, and then from Iowa State University with B.E. degree in 1957. In 1964, Batcher received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois.
Batcher died in Stow, Ohio on August 22, 2019, at the age of 83.
Career and achievements.
Among the designs he worked on at Goodyear were the:
Batcher published several technical papers and owns 14 patents of his own. "He discovered two parallel sorting algorithms: the odd-even mergesort and the bitonic mergesort". He is also a discoverer of scrambling data method in a random access memory which allows accesses along multiple dimensions. These memories were used in the STARAN and the MPP parallel processors.
Awards.
In 1980, he received an "Arnstein Award" presented by Goodyear Aerospace Corporation for technical achievement.
In 1990, Batcher was awarded the ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award for his pioneering work on parallel computers. He holds 14 patents.
In 2007, Batcher was awarded the IEEE Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award; "For fundamental theoretical and practical contributions to massively parallel computation, including parallel sorting algorithms, interconnection networks, and pioneering designs of the STARAN and MPP computers."
Batcher is credited with discovering two important parallel sorting algorithms: the odd-even mergesort and the bitonic mergesort.
Batcher is known for his half-serious, half-humorous definition that "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems."
Publications.
As author or co-author in "Journal articles"
U.S. patents with Kenneth E. Batcher as the inventor or one of the inventors.
The patent number is followed by the title and the year issued.
References.
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