Fran and I were on the same floor at IBM's Watson lab. I was in an AI project doing applied math, e.g., some optimization, and mathematical statistics (for the AI work we were doing, system monitoring, i.e., anomaly detection, better than our AI work!). She was regarded as a major expert in compiling and numerical codes for scientific computing.<p>I heard that she was working on a software product that among many other things would do fast matrix multiplication using some parallelism.<p>So, just for the heck of it, I wrote and ran a little routine in PL/I that used PL/I's feature of multi-tasking to get some parallelism and showed my code to her. She was a little surprised I'd written the code, had a smile, and explained why her work closer to some hardware features (I don't recall the details) would be faster!<p>I wasn't surprised or disappointed that my little PL/I tasking code would be slower than what she was doing, but at least I got her to explain the hardware she was using and how she was exploiting it!<p>As I recall, she was married to Jack Schwartz at Courant Institute of NYU and as in<p>Nelson Dunford and
Jacob T. Schwartz,
<i>Linear Operators</i>.