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He attended the University of Toronto, where he received his Bachelor's degree in 1954, his Master's degree in 1956, and his Ph.D. in 1958Events January January 1 Treaty of Rome founding the EU is implemented January 4 Sputnik 1 falls to Earth from its orbit (launched on October 4 1957) January 8 14 year old Bobby Fischer wins the United States Chess Championship January 18 Armed Lumbee Nat, all in the field of mathematics.
Among his many contributions, Kahan was the primary architect behind the IEEE 754 standard for floating-pointComputer arithmetic A floating-point number is a digital representation for a number in a certain subset of the rational numbers, and is often used to approximate an arbitrary real number on a computer. In particular, it represents an integer or fixed-poi computation (and its radix-independent follow-on, IEEE 854) and contributed an important algorithm for minimizing error introduced when adding a sequence of finite precision floating point numbers (see the Kahan Summation Algorithm).
He received the Turing AwardTuring Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer f in 19891989 is a common year starting on Sunday (click on link for calendar). Events January January 7 Akihito becomes Emperor of Japan following the death of Hirohito. The Heisei period begins January 8 the Kegworth Air Disaster A British Midland Boeing 737 cra, and was named an ACM Fellow in 19941994 is a common year starting on Saturday, and was designated the International year of the Family''. Events January events January 1 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) goes into effect January 6 Nancy Kerrigan is clubbed on the right leg by an.
He is now a professor of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and continues his contributions to the ongoing revision of IEEE 754.