Bruce Howard McCormick was an American computer scientist

Computer scientist

A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....

, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Computer Science, and founding director of the Brain Networks Lab at Texas A&M University

Texas A&M University

Texas A&M University is a coeducational public research university located in College Station, Texas . It is the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System. The sixth-largest university in the United States, A&M's enrollment for Fall 2011 was over 50,000 for the first time in school...

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Biography

McCormick took his BS in Physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 from MIT in 1950, followed by two years on a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University, England. There he studied quantum field theory with Professor Paul Dirac

Paul Dirac

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS was an English theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics...

, founder of the field of quantum mechanics and holder of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Professor Erwin Schrödinger

Erwin Schrödinger

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist and theoretical biologist who was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, and is famed for a number of important contributions to physics, especially the Schrödinger equation, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933...

. McCormick returned to the U.S. to take his PhD in Physics at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1955, with the thesis "Two investigations in meson theory in the non-relativistic limit". He then became a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Brookhaven National Laboratory , is a United States national laboratory located in Upton, New York on Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base...

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In 1957 McCormick accepted a post as staff physicist at the Alvarez Hydrogen Bubble Chamber Group at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The Chamber Group was led by Dr. Luis Alvarez

Luis Alvarez

Luis W. Alvarez was an American experimental physicist and inventor, who spent nearly all of his long professional career on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley...

, who later won the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1960 Dr. McCormick began 12 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

 where he was a professor of physics, computer science, and bioengineering. Afterwards, he served as head of the electrical engineering and computer science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago

University of Illinois at Chicago

The University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC, is a state-funded public research university located in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, near the Chicago Loop...

. McCormick joined Texas A&M in 1983 as the first department head of the newly formed Department of Computer Science in the Dwight Look College of Engineering. In August 2005 Dr. McCormick retired from Texas A&M but continued his research there, exploring and understanding the complexity and scaling properties of the brain's microcircuit structure.

McCormick died the first week of December 2007 in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

Publications

McCormick has authored numerous books and articles. Books:

• 1966. Design concepts for an information resource center with option of an attached automated laboratory. With A. M. Richardson.
• 1968. Pattern articulation unit of Illiac III; homogenous Boolean functions in the iterative array.William J. Watson and Richard T. Borovec.
• 1968. Illiac III programming manual. Edited with R. Lansford.
• 1970. Illiac III computer system; brief description and annotated bibliography.
• 1971. Illiac III reference manual. Edited with B.J. Nordmann and others.
• 1971. Interval generalization of switching theory. With R.S. Michalski.
• 1972. Analysis of texture. With S. N. Jayaramamurthy.
• 1987. Visualization in Scientific Computing. Edited with Thomas A. DeFanti
  Thomas A. DeFanti
  Tom DeFanti is a computer graphics researcher and pioneer. His work has ranged from early computer animation, to scientific visualization, virtual reality, and grid computing...
  
   and Maxine D. Brown
  Maxine D. Brown
  Maxine D. Brown is an American computer scientist and associate director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago . Along with Tom DeFanti and Bruce McCormick, she co-edited the 1987 NSF report, Visualization in Scientific Computing, which defined the...
  
  . ACM Press.

Articles, a selection:

• 1987. "The Usable Intersection of PC Graphics and NTSC Video Recording". With D.J. Sandin. In: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. Oct. 1987, pp. 50–58.
• 1987. "Visualization in Scientific Computing". With T.A. DeFanti and M.D. Brown. In: Computer Graphics. Vol. 21, No. 6, Nov. 1987.
• 1988. "Scientific Animation Workstations". With M.D. Brown. in: SuperComputing. Fall 1988, pp. 10–13.
• 1989. "Scientific Animation Workstations: Creating an Environment for Remote Research, Education, and Communication". With M.D. Brown. In: Academic Computing;;. Feb. 1989, pp. 10–12, 55-57.
• 1989. "Insight Through Images". With M.D. Brown. In: UNIX Review
  UNIX Review
  UNIX Review was an American magazine covering technical aspects of the UNIX operating system and C programming. Recognized for its in-depth technical analyses, the journal also reported on industry confabs and included some lighter fare....
  
  . Mar. 1989, pp. 42–50.
• 1989. "Visualization: Expanding Scientific and Engineering Research Opportunities". With Thomas A. DeFanti and Maxine D. Brown. In: Computer. vol. 22, no. 8, pp. 12–25, Aug., 1989
• 1990. "Advanced visualization environments: knowledge-based image modeling". In: Visualization in supercomputing. July 1990. Pp 135–150.
• 1997. "Grid generation for brain visualization at the cellular and tissue level". With David A. Batte. In: CNS '96: Proceedings of the annual conference on Computational neuroscience : trends in research, 1997. New York : Plenum Press.