Five Minutes with... William Rummler
You knew you were headed for a career in Computer Science when...
I re-discovered my oldest brother's Commodore 64 with some old C64
games in early high school. I had never really understood the existence of
computer programming until I sat down to that light blue-on-blue C64
command prompt.
What is your favorite class and why?
I've only my thesis left to complete here at RIT, but I would say my favorite
class was 4005-800 Algorithms. Simply put, it was a great course (small
section with interested students) with great content taught by a great teacher
(
Professor Bezáková).
One piece of advice I have for 1st year students is...
To conscientiously figure out where you'd like to specialize in the field of
computer science. Talk to your professors, especially those from whom
you take courses. Explore your options by taking a sampling of courses
in different areas. And unless you have a *very* good reason not to (e.g.
advice from a mentor), you should seek to master at least three things:
the C programming language (preferably via a strong dose of complex data
structure/algorithm implementation); a good, standard shell (like Bash)
with its commands and scripting environment; and the LaTeX computer
typesetting tool. I believe that mastery of these three things will serve any
computer scientist well, directly or indirectly, throughout his or her career.
If you could have dinner with a famous computer
scientist, living or dead, who would you choose?
I wouldn't mind dinner and discussion with
Jack Edmonds,
the fellow
who is widely attributed as the first to recognize the importance of the
distinction between polynomial-time and exponential-time in algorithm
analysis. He also developed the polynomial-time non-bipartite matching
algorithm, one of my favorites.
What is the most interesting project you have worked on,
either in a course or on the job?
That would have to be my thesis, "Sampling and counting edge covers".
It's only fitting that this is so. If your thesis/project topic is less interesting
than some previous work, you should probably do your best to change
your topic to an interesting extension of that previous work!
Where do you see yourself in ten years?
Assuming my current plans for a Ph.D. work out, I'll be a 33-year-old algorithms
researcher with several years under my belt, probably as a university professor,
but maybe as an employee of a government or commercial laboratory.
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