Holdings Liberal Arts and Sciences Astronomy Department Larry Smarr Papers Finding Aid Holdings Liberal Arts and Sciences Astronomy Department Larry Smarr Papers Finding Aid By Elizabeth Pope
Title: Larry Smarr Papers, 1956-2000
ID: 15/3/24
Primary Creator: Smarr, Larry
Extent: 21.4 cubic feet
Arrangement: By subject and alphabetically or chronologically within.
Date Acquired: 06/24/2005
Subjects: Astronomy, Astronomy Department, Faculty Papers, National Aeronautics And Space Administration (NASA), National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), National Research Council, National Science Foundation (NSF), Photographs, Physics, Physics Department, Supercomputers
Formats/Genres: Papers
Papers of Larry Smarr (1948- ), professor of Astronomy (1979-2000) and Physics (1980-2000) and Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) (1985-2000) contain correspondence (1971-2000), materials relating to conferences and associations (1970-99), including the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee (AASC) of the National Research Council (NRC), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the General Relativity and Gravitation Conference, research on Galaxy M31, black holes, astronomical topics, and supercomputing (1963-90), a subject file relating to work at the University of Illinois (1980-98), a subject file relating to the directorship of the NCSA (1983-2000), research and edits for articles, chapters, and a book written with William J. Kaufmann III, Supercomputing and the Transformation of Science (1992), and reprints of publications (1973-99). Major correspondents include James Bottum, William Kaufmann, Daniel Alpert, John Bahcall, Joan Centrella, John Hawley, William Press, Dean Sumi, Robert Wolff, and J.W. York.
Larry Lee Smarr (b. 1948) was professor of astronomy (1979-2000), professor of physics (1980-2000), and founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) (1985-2000) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is a widely respected physicist who has made research contributions in the areas of general relativity, computational and observational astronomy, supercomputer applications, and scientific computing. As an administrator, he is known for overseeing and advocating for scientific collaborations including work on Web browsers and personalized medicine.
Smarr was born in Missouri in 1948 and earned a bachelor's degree and master's degree from the University of Missouri in 1970. He went on to earn a master's degree from Stanford University in 1972 and a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975. Smarr held research positions at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard before becoming a professor at UIUC in 1979. Over the course of his tenure at UIUC, his observational, theoretical, and computational research focused on relativistic astrophysics. As founding director of NCSA, he "helped drive major developments in the planetary information infrastructure: the Internet, the Web, scientific visualization, virtual reality, and global telepresence" (Center for Digital Transformation, UCI). Smarr's achievements have brought him widespread recognition, and he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering as well as fellow at the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His awards include the Franklin Institute's Delmer S. Fahrney Medal for Leadership in Science or Technology (1990), the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award (2006), and the Golden Goose Award (2014).
Smarr is currently the Harry E. Gruber Professor of Computer Science and Information Technologies at the Jacobs School, University of California, San Diego, as well as founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). His current research interests include the computer science of large-scale optical networks and data science analysis of the human microbiome.
Sources:
"About Larry Smarr," Calit2, accessed April 27, 2020, http://lsmarr.calit2.net/.
Wikipedia, s.v. "Larry Smarr," accessed April 27, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Smarr.
"Larry Smarr," Center for Digital Transformation (University of California, Irvine), accessed April 27, 2020, http://www.centerfordigitaltransformation.org/assets/Larry-Smarr-Biography-Calit2-Center-for-Digital-Transformation.pdf.
Astronomy
Astronomy Department
Faculty Papers
National Aeronautics And Space Administration (NASA)
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
National Research Council
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Photographs
Physics
Physics Department
Supercomputers
URL: https://files.archon.library.illinois.edu/uasfa/1503024.pdf
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