Richard Fuhr

2022: I am retired now, but worked at Boeing as a software engineer. My work at Boeing included designing and developing algorithms and code for computer-aided design and technical illustration systems. Much of this work involved working with spline curves and surfaces. When I was an undergraduate at UW-Madison, I took a linear algebra course, but found it messy and tedious. But after getting into the working world, I found many practical applications of it (and the computers did the messy and tedious part). A friend of mine taught linear algebra at South Seattle Community College, and for several years I had the opportunity to meet with his class and talk about some practical applications of linear algebra. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin – Madison I took a course in Convex Figures and Inequalities from Professor I. J. Schoenberg. I read that he did a lot of research with splines, but, at the time, I did not know what those objects were. When I got into the working world, I worked with splines myself, which certainly benefited from the work that Professor Schoenberg, and his distinguished UW-Madison colleague, Professor Carl de Boor did.