WORKSHOP ON MATRIX COMPUTATIONS IN MEMORY OF PROFESSOR GENE GOLUB
29 February 2012 Hong Kong Baptist University
http://www.math.hkbu.edu.hk/ICM/workshop/WMCGene12/

On February 29, 2012, the Institute for Computational Mathematics 
(ICM) at the Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) celebrated the 80th
(20th!)  birthday of the late Gene Golub with a workshop on matrix
computations.  Before his untimely death in November 2007, Gene agreed
to take up a three-year appointment as Distinguished Professor at
HKBU, and the University set up the ICM in anticipation of Gene's
assumption of duty in January 2008.

Included in the program of the workshop were thirteen 30-minute talks,
two delicious meals and a lot of warm memories.  The different
countries of origins of the speakers: Canada, China, New Zealand,
Russia, Singapore, Switzerland and the USA, reflected only a fragment
of the rich contact network that Gene cultivated and which he enjoyed
all his life. (Click on the group photo on the web-page of the
workshop to see more pictures.)

There was no registration for the workshop.  So, when the
morning-session chair Walter Gander arrived to check if the video
equipment worked, he got worried because the lecture hall was
essentially empty.  The situation rapidly improved as speakers and
students streamed in over the next few minutes.  The one-day workshop
was attended by about forty people, including many young scholars and
research students.

The scientific program consisted of Gene’s favorite topics,
including high performance computing, preconditioning, a multi-lingual
history of the finite element method, GMINRES, Krylov schemes, the QRZ
factorization, symmetric skew-symmetric splitting, eigenvalue problems
and constrained least squares methods.  The morning session started
and ended with personal reminiscences of Gene by Frank Luk and Tony
Chan, respectively.  Raymond Chan concluded the workshop by remarking
that we must carry the torch to continue Gene's legacy.

Pictures were shown by many speakers, and memories of Serra House were
celebrated. (By the way, Serra House has been moved from its original
location and now houses an institute for gender studies:
http://gender.stanford.edu/directions-serra-house ) Walter Gander
showed a rare photograph of Gene in swimming trunks on a New Jersey
beach.  We learned in a quiz that Gene's Ph.D. supervisor was Abraham
Taub, and we saw a valuable 4-generation picture (contributed by Dan
Boley) taken at the 1993 Lanczos Centenary Conference, showing Taub,
Gene, and some of Gene’s students and grand students.

Gene would have loved this workshop with its friendly and unassuming
atmosphere. The two wonderful meals (a Chinese lunch and an Asian
dinner buffet) reminded everybody of the banquets at the Chinese
restaurants near Stanford.  Over dinner, Gene’s life was celebrated
again in conversations. As we all know, people and Chinese food were
among Gene's most favorite things in life!