The list of Rice University people includes notable alumni, former students, faculty, and presidents of Rice University.
The names of Distinguished Alumni Award recipients is available online [1] (the list is arranged alphabetically and includes recipients of other Rice University awards)
The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) is NASA's center for human spaceflight in Houston, Texas, where human spaceflight training, research, and flight control are conducted. It was renamed in honor of the late US president and Texas native, Lyndon B. Johnson, by an act of the United States Senate on February 19, 1973.
Bonnie Jeanne Dunbar is an American engineer and retired NASA astronaut. She flew on five Space Shuttle missions between 1985 and 1998, including two dockings with the Mir space station.
The George R. Brown School of Engineering is an academic school at Rice University in Houston, Texas. It contains the departments of Bioengineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, Materials Science and Nanoengineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Statistics. Engineering has been part of Rice's curriculum since the university's founding in 1912, but the school was not established as its own unit until 1975.
Bob was teaching an undergraduate course in chemistry the semester he and Rick Smalley were awarded the Nobel Prize
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Pressures and Goals
There were two major purposes in designing the Rice machine. The first was to provide a platform on which members of the Rice community could do research that would have been impossibly time-consuming without access to a computer. This was, in fact, the major reason that the project was started: Zevi Salsburg wanted a machine as powerful as Los Alamos's MANIAC II to simulate fluid flow. He did not, however, have any desire to move to Los Alamos, and therefore needed a computer to be built at Rice.
The other goal of the machine was to do research into how computers should be built. In the years following John von Neumann's death, the Atomic Energy Commission became quite interested in funding computer research: Salsburg's request came at a time when the AEC's goals could be better met by funding the development of a new system than by offering to build a copy of MANIAC II or to buy a stock IBM computer.
Chronology
Towards the end of 1956, Zevi Salsburg, John Kilpatrick, and Larry Biedenharn, all Rice professors, decided they needed a computer "like the one at Los Alamos." [...] The Rice Computer was designed not only to do research into how best to build computers, but to get work done for faculty members as well. [...] Salsburg investigated the packing of spheres in N-dimensional space to represent fluid flow. [...]