Paul Purdom spent his academic career at the California Institute of Technology. He earned his B.S. in 1961, his M.S. the following year, and in 1966 his PhD in nuclear physics. While at CalTech, Paul took a numerical analysis course in which Don Knuth was the teaching assistant. After receiving his PhD, and at the recommendation of the aforementioned Don Knuth, Paul accepted the position of Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin. While on leave from UW, Paul worked as a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs, where he designed part of the computational telephone exchange. He was also promoted to Associate Professor. He still receives recognition for research inspired by this work.
In 1971, Paul joined the faculty of Indiana University as an associate professor in the Computer Science Department. Paul taught design and analysis of data structures and algorithms and rapidly made his mark in the department. He succeeded Frank Prosser as department chair in 1977 and he served in this role for five years. In addition, Paul provided leadership in all essential committees for academic affairs and governance policies, and was involved in writing the constitution for the School of Informatics. Paul was instrumental in reestablishing an expanded Computer Science Department in SICE and his positive impact on his students has led to the creation of the Paul Purdom Fellowship in the School, funded by Chung Wu.
Paul is a former president of the IU chapter of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. His research has included design and analysis for computing transitive closure to reason about connectivity properties in graphs, design and probabilistic analysis of efficient branch-and-bound algorithms (recursive search for solutions in combinatorially large search spaces such as that of games of chess), design and analysis for the propositional satisfiability (SAT) problems, probabilistic analysis of fundamental data mining problems, study of parsing and compilation techniques for programming languages, and the study of efficient discovery of generators in finite groups. Additionally, he spent time working on phylogenetic tree generation.
Paul co-authored a textbook, The Analysis of Algorithms, with Cynthia Brown. During the course of this collaboration, Cynthia encountered Paul’s unique work style and thought process, most notably what she calls his “self-correcting algebra.” She explains, “We would be proving some result and Paul would write a draft of a proof. When I read it over I would find a mistake in the math. But later in the draft, I would find another mistake that cancelled the first one out. So somehow he came up with pretty nearly a correct proof of a nice result. It wouldn’t be that hard to fix the proof at that point, since the basic approach was right. I think this shows he has really good instincts for what the correct result should be. I don’t think it was a conscious process at all.”
The Monroe County Democratic Party recently honored Paul for his lifetime of service, a testament to his commitment to service that extends beyond IU and into the greater community. The loss to our community will be difficult to overcome, as Paul and his wife, Donna, after five decades and rearing three children here, have decided to trade in Indiana winters for the gentler climate of California. Before Paul heads west, perhaps he will share a Coca-Cola with us, teach us the finer points of the Game of Go, or lead us in a lively discussion on American and world history.
We greatly appreciate Paul’s contributions to his field, the Computer Science Department, and to Indiana University, as well as to the Bloomington community. Above all else, we are all grateful for the opportunity to call Paul Purdom our friend.