Milos Konopasek

Last updated April 24, 2019

Milos Konopasek (died in Boston, Massachusetts, 9 January 2002) was a Czechoslovakia-born mechanical engineer best known as the creator of TK!Solver, an iterative, constraint-based declarative environment for the numerical solution of systems of equations.

Boston is the capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city proper covers 48 square miles (124 km²) with an estimated population of 685,094 in 2017, making it also the most populous city in New England. Boston is the seat of Suffolk County as well, although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999. The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest such area in the country. As a combined statistical area (CSA), this wider commuting region is home to some 8.2 million people, making it the sixth-largest in the United States.

Massachusetts, officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It borders on the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island to the south, New Hampshire and Vermont to the north, and New York to the west. The state is named after the Massachusett tribe, which once inhabited the east side of the area, and is one of the original thirteen states. The capital of Massachusetts is Boston, which is also the most populous city in New England. Over 80% of Massachusetts's population lives in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, a region influential upon American history, academia, and industry. Originally dependent on agriculture, fishing and trade, Massachusetts was transformed into a manufacturing center during the Industrial Revolution. During the 20th century, Massachusetts's economy shifted from manufacturing to services. Modern Massachusetts is a global leader in biotechnology, engineering, higher education, finance, and maritime trade.

Czechoslovakia, or Czecho-Slovakia, was a sovereign state in Central Europe that existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until its peaceful dissolution into the Czech Republic and Slovakia on 1 January 1993.

Biography

Konopasek was born in Czechoslovakia and graduated from the Leningrad Textile Institute, Leningrad, USSR, and received the Ph.D. and D.Sc degrees from the University of Manchester, England. His career included management, research, and teaching positions in Czechoslovakia, United Kingdom, and the United States, including at the Georgia Institute of Technology and North Carolina State University.

Saint Petersburg is Russia's second-largest city after Moscow, with 5 million inhabitants in 2012, part of the Saint Petersburg agglomeration with a population of 6.2 million (2015). An important Russian port on the Baltic Sea, it has a status of a federal subject.

The University of Manchester is a public research university in Manchester, England, formed in 2004 by the merger of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and the Victoria University of Manchester. The University of Manchester is a red brick university, a product of the civic university movement of the late 19th century.

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to the west and Scotland to the north-northwest. The Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south. The country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, and includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight.

At Manchester in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he developed a system called "Question Answering System on mathematical models" (QAS). [1] He expected his system to be used by a broad range of non-computer professionals and non-mathematicians who apply math to their fields.

Konopasek recognized that the new personal computer was an ideal vehicle for bringing his concept to the masses and developed a version of his system for them in 1977. [2] In 1982, Software Arts commercialized TK!Solver based on his work.

A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or technician. Unlike large costly minicomputer and mainframes, time-sharing by many people at the same time is not used with personal computers.

Software Arts was a software company founded by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1979 to develop VisiCalc, which was published by a separate company, Personal Software Inc., later named VisiCorp.

Konopasek was Senior Scientist at Software Arts while holding a visiting faculty position in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at M.I.T.; when TK!Solver was sold to Universal Technical Systems (Rockford, Illinois), he continued as Vice President of UTS.

Rockford is a city in Winnebago County in the U.S. state of Illinois, in far northern Illinois. Located on the banks of the Rock River, Rockford is the county seat of Winnebago County. The largest city in Illinois outside of the Chicago metropolitan area, Rockford is the third-largest city in the state and the 171st most populous in the United States According to 2010 U.S. Census Data, the City of Rockford had a population of 152,871, with an outlying metropolitan area population of 348,360. The City of Rockford's population is 147,051 as of 2017, down 4.1% since 2010.

Most of his research interests and contributions were in textile engineering, applied mechanics, operations research, and computer science, in areas as diverse as CAD/CAM, large deflection analysis of slender bodies, topology of line structures, and language design. Konopasek was a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.

Computer-aided design constructing a product by means of computer

Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. CAD software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve communications through documentation, and to create a database for manufacturing. CAD output is often in the form of electronic files for print, machining, or other manufacturing operations. The term CADD is also used.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is an international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947, and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, with nearly 100,000 members as of 2019. Its headquarters are in New York City.

IEEE Computer Society is a professional society of IEEE. Its purpose and scope is "to advance the theory, practice, and application of computer and information processing science and technology" and the "professional standing of its members." The CS is the largest of 39 technical societies organized under the IEEE Technical Activities Board.

Notes

↑ M. Konopasek, "An advanced question answering system on sets of algebraic equations", in Proceedings of the European Conference on Interactive Systems, ed. Lewin, 1975.
↑ M. Konopasek and M. Kazmierczak, "A question answering system on mathematical models in microcomputer environments", in Proceedings of a Conference on Personal and Home Computers ed. J. C. Warren, Computer Faire, San Francisco (1977).

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

Related Research Articles

Computer science is the study of processes that interact with data and that can be represented as data in the form of programs. It enables the use of algorithms to manipulate, store, and communicate digital information. A computer scientist studies the theory of computation and the practice of designing software systems.

Design can have different connotations in different fields of application, but there are two basic meanings of design: as a verb and as a noun.

Barry W. Boehm is an American software engineer, distinguished professor of computer science, industrial and systems engineering; the TRW Professor of Software Engineering; and founding director of the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at the University of Southern California. He is known for his many contributions to the area of software engineering.

The MathWorks, Inc. is an American privately held corporation that specializes in mathematical computing software. Its major products include MATLAB and Simulink, which support data analysis and simulation.

The differential analyser is a mechanical analogue computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, using wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. It was one of the first advanced computing devices to be used operationally. The original machines could not add, but then it was noticed that if the two wheels of a rear differential are turned, the drive shaft will compute the average of the left and right wheels. A simple gear ratio of 1:2 then enables multiplication by two, so addition are achieved. Multiplication is just a special case of integration, namely integrating a constant function.

Computational science is a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field that uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex problems. It is an area of science which spans many disciplines, but at its core it involves the development of models and simulations to understand natural systems.

TK Solver is a mathematical modeling and problem solving software system based on a declarative, rule-based language, commercialized by Universal Technical Systems, Inc.

Mathematical software is software used to model, analyze or calculate numeric, symbolic or geometric data.

The following outline is provided as a topical overview of science:

ASCEND is an open source, mathematical modelling chemical process modelling system developed at Carnegie Mellon University since late 1978. ASCEND is an acronym which stands for Advanced System for Computations in Engineering Design. Its main uses have been in the field of chemical process modelling although its capabilities are general.

A solver is a piece of mathematical software, possibly in the form of a stand-alone computer program or as a software library, that 'solves' a mathematical problem. A solver takes problem descriptions in some sort of generic form and calculates their solution. In a solver, the emphasis is on creating a program or library that can easily be applied to other problems of similar type.

Arne Sølvberg is a Norwegian computer scientist, professor in computer science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, and an expert in the field of information modelling.

Rostam Karim Saeed is a Kurdish mathematician and professor from Iraq. He is known for finding methods to solve system of volterra integral equations.

SmartDO is a multidisciplinary design optimization software, based on the Direct Global Search technology developed and marketed by FEA-Opt Technology. SmartDO specialized in the CAE-Based optimization, such as CAE, FEA, CAD, CFD and automatic control, with application on various physics phenomena. It is both GUI and scripting driven, allowed to be integrated with almost any kind of CAD/CAE and in-house codes.

Ioan Dzițac is a Romanian professor of mathematics and computer science, M.Sc. in Mathematics (1977) and PhD in computer science (2002) from Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, currently a professor at the Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad and rector of Agora University in Oradea.

David Pearson is a British physicist and computer scientist. He has degrees in physics and theoretical physics from London University and Imperial College of Science and Technology, and in computer science from the University of Cambridge, where he did his postgraduate research in the resolution of three-dimensional matrices of second-order partial differential equation sets. Whilst still at university, he had also done early work for British Steel in the use of very high frequency oscillators in the measurement of surface roughness in a continuous strip steel rolling mill. He is an Associate of the Royal College of Science. He joined International Computers Limited in 1968 and became Head of Software Engineering, responsible for CADES, the development system for the ICL 2900 Series Operating System. In 1977 he was appointed Director of Advanced Development for Bell-Northern Research in Ottawa and Palo Alto California. In 1981 he joined the ranks of the early-80s hitech entrepreneurs and became the co-founder and President of Orcatech, one of the world's first intelligent graphics workstation companies. He went on to become the founding Chief Executive of the Strathclyde Institute in Glasgow, Scotland, Senior Director of Scottish Enterprise and Chief Executive for the economic development agency for Norfolk and Waveney. Before moving back to Canada, he spent three years as Chief Operating Officer of the Industrial Society, later to become the Work Foundation. He has Canadian and British citizenships.

Axel van Lamsweerde is a Belgian computer scientist and Professor of Computing Science at the Universite catholique de Louvain, known for his work on requirements engineering and the development of the KAOS goal-oriented modeling language.

[1] M. Konopasek, "An advanced question answering system on sets of algebraic equations", in Proceedings of the European Conference on Interactive Systems, ed. Lewin, 1975.

[2] M. Konopasek and M. Kazmierczak, "A question answering system on mathematical models in microcomputer environments", in Proceedings of a Conference on Personal and Home Computers ed. J. C. Warren, Computer Faire, San Francisco (1977).