IEEE Awards Booklet - 2014 - 13

2014 IEEE MEDALS

IEEE Simon Ramo Medal

IEEE John von Neumann Medal

Sponsored by Northrop Grumman Corporation

Sponsored by IBM Corporation

Lyndon Rees Evans

Cleve B. Moler

For systems leadership of the Large
Hadron Collider Project from conceptual
design through completion of construction

For fundamental and widely used contributions to numerical linear algebra and
scientific and engineering software that
transformed computational science

A master of accelerator physics, Lyndon Rees Evans' leadership
in the design and successful development of the Large Hadron
Collider has resulted in one of engineering's greatest milestones
and is allowing scientists to expand our knowledge of fundamental physics. As the project director (1995-2009) of the highestenergy particle collider ever created, Dr. Evans was responsible
for the research and development of the large superconducting
magnets, the 27-km-long super-fluid cryogenic system, the integration of thousands of highly accurate power supplies, the optical
design of beam collision regions, and the related instrumentation
and control systems. He coordinated the efforts of thousands of
engineers from around the world, and his ability to make difficult
decisions when was faced with problems was critical to keeping the project on track. The Large Hadron Collider went live
in 2008, but during start-up operations it faced one of its most
serious challenges when a superconducting splice between two
of the magnets failed near the peak design current during a sector test. This caused a large number of magnets to terminate in
an uncontrolled way. Dr. Evans and his team analyzed the failure,
determined how to prevent this type of failure in the future, and
executed the work that was needed to resume operations. After a
one-year interruption, beam commissioning was completed very
quickly and science operations began in 2010. In 2012, the large
detectors, center of mass energy, and luminosity provided by the
Large Hadron Collider enabled the discovery of the elusive Higgs
boson, which had been the object of intense searches for 30 years.
This discovery allows scientists to validate the standard model of
particle physics.
A Fellow of the Royal Society (U.K.), Dr. Evans is currently
director of linear collider collaboration with the European
Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland.

Cleve B. Moler is considered one of the most influential contributors to computational science and engineering for his development of the MATLAB high-level programming environment
that changed the face of numerical computation and provided
an indispensable tool for engineers worldwide. Dr. Moler developed MATLAB, which stands for "matrix laboratory," as a simple
matrix calculator for student use in mathematical courses, but it
soon found broader acceptance in engineering. MATLAB makes
computing easier for scientists and engineers and increases productivity by allowing them to focus on solving the problem at
hand without needing to write their own code to perform matrix computations. In 1984, Dr. Moler founded MathWorks with
Jack Little to commercialize MATLAB.Today, MATLAB has over
1 million users representing universities, industry, and government
worldwide. It is an important tool in industries including automotive, aerospace, communications, electronics, industrial automation, financial services, and computational biology. MATLAB
is used at over 5,000 universities, and it is often the first programming language taught to science and engineering students. Other
impactful contributions from Dr. Moler include the LINPACK
and EISPACK linear algebra software libraries for computation
involving matrices, which he helped develop during the 1970s.
LINPACK and EISPACK gave scientists the ability to solve complex problems without requiring them to be experts in the algorithms and software.The LINPACK Benchmark, used to rank the
world's fastest supercomputers, is named after the LINPACK software library. Dr. Moler also contributed to linear algebra during
the 1960s by writing reliable state-of-the-art Fortran subroutines
for matrix computations and creating (with Pete Stewart) the QZ
algorithm for the generalized eigenvalue problem prevalent in
many applications.
A member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering
and recipient of IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award (2012),
Dr. Moler is currently chief mathematician with MathWorks,
Natick, Mass.

Scope: For exceptional achievement in systems engineering and
systems science

Scope: For outstanding achievements in computer-related science
and technology

13 | 2014 IEEE AWARDS BOOKLET

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2014