Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the faculty at Rice University for freely sharing their knowledge and contacts for this book, in particular Dr. David Scott for his help in statistics and Dr. Danny Sorensen for his help in linear algebra.

Further thanks is extended to Dr. Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee), Dr. Charles Van Loan (Cornell University), Dr. Michael Heath (University of Illinois), Dr. Michael Trosset (University of Arizona), Clay Moore (Casio), Dr. Richard Askey (University of Wisconsin), Dr. Daniel Lozier (National Institute of Standards and Technology), Dr. Zhinjun Wu (Rice University), and Steve Gibbs (Vice President/Director-NHRA Motorsports Museum) and Greg Sharpe (??) of the National Hot Rod Association.

Special thanks are also extended to Dr. Amr El-Bakry, Erin Marie Kellam-Cestero, and Samitra R. Seales for their tireless work on various drafts of this book.

This project was made possible by support from the National Science Foundation through the outreach projects NPACI, Alliance, and the Center for Research in Parallel Computing (Rice University). We would also like to thank the Department of Computational And Applied Mathematics at Rice Univerity for their continued support.