Mark Wells

Home * People * Mark Wells

Mark Brimhall Wells, an American mathemantician and computer scientist, since the 50s affiliated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in 1961 on Boolean algebra under advisor Derrick H. Lehmer, and the New Mexico State University.

=MANIAC= During the 50s, at Los Alamos National Laboratory around Stanislaw Ulam, Paul Stein and John Pasta, Mark Wells was involved in the development of the chess-playing program to play Los Alamos Chess with the MANIAC I. Mark Wells further launched the development of the MADCAP, a high-level programming language and compiler, which was a critical development because it provided a convenient way to communicate with the MANIAC.

=Selected Publications=

1957 ...

 * James Kister, Paul Stein, Stanislaw Ulam, William Walden, Mark Wells (1957). Experiments in Chess. Journal of the ACM, Vol. 4, No. 2

1960 ...

 * Mark B. Wells (1961). Simplification of Normal Form Expressions for Boolean Functions of Many Variables. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, advisor Derrick H. Lehmer
 * Mark B. Wells (1961). MADCAP: a scientific compiler for a displayed formula textbook language. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 4, No. 1
 * Mark B. Wells (1962). Application of a Finite Set Covering Theorem to the Simplification of Boolean Function Expressions. IFIP Congress

1970 ...

 * Mark B. Wells (1971). Elements of Combinatorial Computing. Elsevier, ISBN-13: 978-0080160917
 * Mark B. Wells (1972). A Review of Two-dimensional Programming Languages. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 7, No. 10
 * Mark B. Wells (1977). Implementation and application of a function data type. AFIPS '77
 * David K. Kahaner, Mark B. Wells (1979). An Experimental Algorithm for N-Dimensional Adaptive Quadrature. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, Vol. 5, No. 1

1980 ...

 * Rollo Silver, Mark Wells, Shaun-Inn Wu, Margaret A. Hug (1986). A concurrent N ≤ 8 Queens' algorithm using Modcap. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 21, No. 9

1990 ...

 * Mark B. Wells (1990). Identifiers and static name abstraction. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 25, No. 5

=External Links=
 * The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Mark Wells
 * LANL: The Rest of the Story by Roger Snodgrass, Los Alamos Monitor Editor, July 16, 2008

=References= Up one level