David Plaisted
(Contact information available)
lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Dave Plaisted reports
I grew up south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I attended MIT for one year and transferred to the University of Chicago and got a BS in mathematics in 1970. I got a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1976. I was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1974 to 1985.
Since then I have been a professor of computer science at UNC Chapel Hill.
I spent a sabbatical at SRI in Menlo Park, California in about 1980 and another in Germany in about 1994. I also spent a summer in France in Grenoble and Nancy, doing research, and a few weeks in Taiwan giving lectures at universities there. I stopped in Hawaii flying both to and from Taiwan to break up the long plane trip. I learned German and to some extent French and Spanish by listening to the short-wave radio and looking up words in the dictionary. My wife takes vacations in Europe, especially the Tirol area of Austria, from time to time and as we can afford it.
My area of research is automated deduction, trying to program computers to prove mathematical theorems automatically or semi-automatically. This area is related to artificial intelligence. It is a very pure area right now but is becoming more applied. But funding and fame are not easily found in this area so I am not greatly rich or famous.
I married just after graduating from the University of Chicago and was divorced soon afterwards. In 1977 I met my current wife. She was a teller in the bank I used. We were married six months later in 1978. We now have two children. One of them is married to a girl from Brazil and works as a programmer in Atlanta, Georgia. The other is an engineering student at NC State.
My wife and I are Seventh-day Adventists. I joined the church in 1971 and she was baptized in 1978. I am the church pianist despite a lack of training in this area and also frequently preach at our church. I also play the guitar a little. My wife works with the Pathfinders, our equivalent of scouts. I also enjoy hiking and bird watching. Anne and I went on a canoe trip in Canada with some friends a few years ago, on a lake north of Banff. We camped at a different spot each night. There were many forest fires at the time and we saw one while canoeing. Bits of ash would float down from the sky and the rain was a dirty color and soiled anything it fell on. Since this trip, my wife got more courage to try backpacking and camping and now we do it often, especially with our church youth group. We are both vegetarians and I cook most of my own food from scratch using mostly whole grains and little refined food, oil, or sugar.
This was the first ever reunion I attended and I will attend two reunions this year. It was a great pleasure to see so many people that I had not seen for such a long time and who mean so much to me. In fact I was overwhelmed to see so many people and to have so many memories return to me. I had a great year at Williamsville because everyone was so friendly. Thank you to the organizers for doing such a great job on the reunion, and best wishes to everyone for happiness and success and God's blessings in the future.
