Frederick P. Brooks Jr. - "Last Blast"

So, we have a number of of speakers that we've lined up for you tonight. And our

first one is none other than than Dr. Brooks. And Dr. Brooks has listed on the

Brooks. And Dr. Brooks has listed on the program that he's giving his last blast, which sounds kind of ominous. And and

the reason for this, of course, is because uh as I mentioned uh or I didn't mention, but it's in the program that Fred is actually retiring at the end of the current academic year. Now Fred

before he interrupts me would very correctly say that actually he retired in 2005 and in two which is true he did and in 2005 what he did was he took advantage

of a system here that's called phased retirement which allows you to go on uh essentially 50% time for a small period of time. uh Fred Fred clearly had

a special deal where his small period of time has now been 10 years and but nonetheless I think this is still a momentous event because even when Fred

Brooks goes down to 50% I mean his 50% you know puts most of us to shame right so uh so we're not buying this he retired in 2005 bit uh at all and so in

these 10 years while he was quote winding down he only outlasted three chancellors three deans and three three department chairs. So,

department chairs. So, so yes, he's been retired for 10 years.

Um, so so Fred is a difficult person uh to to introduce. I mean, I could talk for half an hour about his achievements and his accomplishments. I mean, he's

had a very very long career and a very very uh distinguished career, but we all know Fred is a modest person. And one of Fred's dictims is that one of our best

products where R is the department or our being him is uh the people. Uh it's

it's you folks. So maybe as a way to introduce Fred, what I'd like to do is ask everyone who was advised by Fred, took a class by Fred, or has interacted with Fred in some substantive way to

stand up.

Thank you.

So, everyone here clearly knows Fred.

So, that gets me off the hook. And

actually, Fred himself gets me off the hook because he introduced Ivan Sutherland, luminary computer scientist who we all know. And he ended with saying, and I wrote it down here to quote, just wrote it here in pen. You

can read the rest of his bio. So, with

that, I'd like to invite Dr. Brooks to the podium for some special remarks.

[Applause] First, I want to thank all of you for coming. It's a great pleasure, a great

coming. It's a great pleasure, a great joy to have you here and to join in this celebratory occasion. I want to

celebratory occasion. I want to especially acknowledge three people. One

is Liv Moore Jones who was the mother of the department and One is Paul Oliver. Paul, will you stand?

Okay, there he is. Paul received the first PhD granted in this department and one is Craig Mudge.

Craig, would you stand?

I think I think he's traveled the farthest to get here from Australia.

I celebrated my 84th birthday a couple of Sundays ago and therefore at this point anytime you have an opportunity to make a speech, you don't

know but what it'll be your last blast.

And so I thought, all right, here's an opportunity and I I want to do that. And

so whereas most of the talks have been excitingly looking forward, I I want to ask the question of what do you all want to be when you grow

up?

What does the department want to be when it grows up?

And the the remarks are going to be the my first half of my remarks are going to be aimed at that question from a departmental point of view. And I want to talk about the values that I think

have made this for me especially wonderful place to live and work.

But for the alumni, these will apply to you in your workplaces too. And so I hope that you get a little bit of of takehome from that.

The first thing I want to say is when the legal, you know, age of retirement is 65, why does anybody stay

on till 84?

And the answer is I can't imagine anything more satisfying to do than what this opportunity has been to do it. And

it's because of you.

I think the most important characteristic of the enterprise and the one most important to preserve has been the spirit of our undertaking.

It is a rare gift given to very few people in the human race but to most academics to do for fun what we would

otherwise what the to make our living doing for fun what we would have otherwise done free and for computer scientists we have the

special joy of making things we are unable to have the creative outlets provided by grants and facilities and

colleagues and knowledgeable experts and all kinds of things. For teachers, we have the special joy of growing people, of watching them as as been said earlier

today, of watching them mature and listening to the lectures today was really a delight.

Mature after maturity.

And finally, there's the joy of doing both the teaching and the making of things in company of people we like and admire. And that's the thing that makes

admire. And that's the thing that makes it a special joy to come to work every day. And for those of you who've asked,

day. And for those of you who've asked, I don't plan to go anywhere. Um

I guess the the the other question keeps getting asked is what's wrong with your foot? And the answer is it was minor

foot? And the answer is it was minor surgery and will be well in a couple of weeks. Second

weeks. Second now, how do I go backwards? I

Okay, so when talking about the things that I I find have made this a joyful place to work,

the first is we're a team. And as all very good teams are, we recognize that we win. We all win when any one of us

we win. We all win when any one of us wins. One of the things that delights my

wins. One of the things that delights my heart is in the faculty meeting here in the rounds of applause when somebody gets a grant an award. We all rejoice

when one wins. We help each other succeed.

We collaborate with each other. We share

equipment. There are departments where my lab is my lab and you don't go in my lab. And there are departments where if

lab. And there are departments where if you need to use something in my lab, just ask me. And this is that kind of place. And I think that's wonderful. And

place. And I think that's wonderful. And

we cheer each other on. Now I will remark that institutionally we have an advantage. They are departments which on

advantage. They are departments which on purpose hire twice as many assistant professors as they plan to keep. And

this does not encourage collaboration among the new hires.

But UNCC's policy has been that if you get promoted your job gets promoted, your slot gets promoted and that means we are never in competition with each

other. We want each other to succeed.

other. We want each other to succeed.

Next point I would like to make and I think this is very important to carry forward and that is we have always been

bold enough to be us and I want to point out some logic behind this. The first is ratings are a mirage. And if you look back at the data, the data show that

department ratings correlate very strongly with department size.

Well, we're never going to be an MIT or a CMU or a Stanford in terms of size.

And so consequently, if we just did be an imitator, we're going to be a third rate imitator

for sheer size reasons. if if no other.

And as third rate imitators, we're never going to gra attract the great applicants and we're never going to attract the great colleagues.

On the other hand, if we adopt the notion that we can be great in something and we pick somethings, then we can attract the people who for those

somethings, this is an especially attractive place. And so our strategy

attractive place. And so our strategy from day one has been to pick peaks of excellence and try to build mutually reinforcing groups within those

peaks of excellence rather than to say we're going to cover all of computer science. I still recommend that

science. I still recommend that strategy. We've had that argument as

strategy. We've had that argument as recently as the faculty meeting last Friday and it will come up every year that we get a slot, but it is still the sound

strategy for a middlesized department and I commend it to you. Now it's

important I think that we pick not only peaks but peaks that mutually reinforce each reinforce each other and have something to say to each other and help

each other grow. And so that's a strategic comp component is picking mutually reinforcing areas.

And the third point is you want to look and see where you think the field is going and pick the peaks where we can make a contribution and

where it is going to be strategic in terms of the whole field.

I'm still messing backwards. Okay.

We share our governance and we owe an immense debt to Henry Fuks here who many years ago said why don't we have a weekly faculty lunch.

I think no single factor has been as important in the sociology of this department as the weekly faculty lunch.

We see each other face to face.

We are charged severally and jointly with advising the chair on promotion and tenure. And for those who don't know it,

tenure. And for those who don't know it, we are only charged with advising. The

chair is perfectly free to take our advice and completely ignore it and head off 180 degrees differently. That's part

of the structure of the university.

But we do undertake to advise the chair.

We are very good at court c courteous disagreement. I have never seen people

disagreement. I have never seen people leave a faculty meeting mad at each other over their arguments. I've seen

them disagree very vigorously. Good.

Okay. We want to speak honestly. We want

to express opinions precisely but courteously.

We fall in behind whatever decision has been made and supported. We may gripe.

Yes, we gripe. All right. But we support and move forward once the decisions been made. I think an important factor in our

made. I think an important factor in our governance pattern is we count on having a voting student representative in our

meetings. And

meetings. And we've only recently debated the question of do we need an voting undergraduate student in

addition to the voting graduate student who represents the whole graduate student body and that's a decision the department needs to make and I won't

advise on it although I have an opinion and then two kind of governing principles that guide our debate that I I think have been very useful. One is

all rules have exceptions and so we make a rule and then we feel free when an individual case comes along to make an exception. And you'll observe

the logical paradox here. Does this rule have an exception? All right. And

lastly, I would say we set no precedents by action on any of the student cases because the stu no students are alike.

And we've said just the fact that we did it for John does not mean we have to do it for Joe. John and Joe are different people and we recognize their uniqueness

by saying we have not set precedents by our actions. I think this is an

our actions. I think this is an important principle and one to be invoked from time to time in our debates.

We collaborate with users. And this has been and you've heard me on this subject before so I won't elaborate but I think this is important

for computer scientists as computer scientists. I we we call this the

scientists. I we we call this the toolsmith principle that computer mathematics is the queen of the sciences even if it's not a science. All right.

Computer science is the handmaidaden and we are useful to the degree that we serve and we can serve

and the advantage of serving is that we become better computer scientists.

Now, this enables us to find new ways to help humanity. And I've been impressed

help humanity. And I've been impressed in the talks today of the many different ways that our alumni have come up with ways of really making a contribution.

I will assert and I have asserted I will assert forever that taking other people's problems as opposed to just taking another computer

science paper and saying oh I can do a little re revision on that one taking other people's problems learning and solving them on their terms leads us to

alleys in computer science that we never would have led in and some of those turn out to be highways And so and it forces us to fresh viewpoints.

You heard uh some of us heard Amitab today saying he he he had to go learn a new whole new trade as it were in

working with radiologists because he'd been working with other kinds of scientists.

Isn't it wonderful to be forced to learn another whole new field? The best case I ever know I I remember

name gone uh was working with a facial reconstruction person for his dissertation and the

notion huh Holloway Rich Holloway. Yeah. All right.

There he is.

And the the dream was that by virtual reality the surgeon would be able to see what the would be the state of the

patient after the postulated surgery. So

move the bones here, move the tissues here and visualize it. Well, it turned out that that would require doing that right would require a latency system

latency of about 1 millisecond. And so

Rich wisely moved on to another field.

But in the meantime, he had an oral examination and the surgeon told him he had to learn the 16

landmarks on the skull. And so Rich went and learned them. And we got to the oral exam. And at that when the surgeon's

exam. And at that when the surgeon's turn to ask a question came, he fished out a real human skull, handed them to Rich and said, "Name them.

And then the last point I would make is that by collaborating with users, the place is loaded with some very talented people. It was my blessing for 30 years

people. It was my blessing for 30 years to work with Dave and Jane Richardson.

And that'll bring me to another whole point. But you know they are very good

point. But you know they are very good protein chemists and it's exciting to work with very good people of any

caliber and we have them all over the place.

I think another general strategic principle is to stop and assess what your comparative advantages over other people in the same kind of business are.

And I think in some cases we've done phenomenally well in taking advantage of our collaborative our comparative advantages and in other cases we have in

the past but are not now and in some cases we haven't really seized on them in the past.

One of our big comparative advantages com is we have close relationships geographically and organizationally

and in a small town with the medical school and the P school of public health similar relationships with the pharmacy

school. All right.

school. All right.

We have the opportunity which we have not fully exploited to take advantage of a close relationship with sills which is is now in the big data business and has

brought a first class big data team here. We need we need to work that. We

here. We need we need to work that. We

have in the past had students our students doing PhDs in collaboration with people in biomed engineering. We

need to work that one again. We have in the beginning when we were you know teensyweenatsy faculty collaborating very closely with Duke and state in

offering courses in the specialties we're not in. Well last week in the faculty meeting we were discussing don't we need more theoreticians? Guess what?

We got theoreticians 12 miles down the road. All right. Have we made their

road. All right. Have we made their acquaintance? Have we invited them over

acquaintance? Have we invited them over to a showcase of what we do and and invited ourselves to find out what they do? I think we have not and taken

do? I think we have not and taken advantage of that. The same thing is true of our engineering colleagues over at NC State. The research triangle high-tech industry we are doing

reasonably well at collaborating with and so some with Cisco and some of the game companies and whatnot.

And I think this is a plus. One of our comparative advantages is Chapel Hill is a great place to live. And I remember when I was first recruited, I came down

on they somehow picked it. So it was the last week in March and the dog woods were blooming and the flowering cherries and they baby they had babysitter had

our kids out on the grass here in the Carolina and we had come from Pipsy where the snow was still pile over here and the lakes were frozen over. It was

very hard to turn down that original our original.

A thing we have not capitalized on is that increasingly Chapel Hill is a place people come to be near their grandkids.

They choose to retire it because the climate is good and they want to leave the cold north and their kids have moved here. And there's nothing as attractive

here. And there's nothing as attractive as grandkids, even more attractive than kids. So,

kids. So, and we have in the past taken advantage of this. Our very first associate

of this. Our very first associate chairman was Jim Rob who had retired here to be with his grandkids and he was a retired vice president of Continental

Telephone Company. And when he went down

Telephone Company. And when he went down to 440 to deal with the bureaucracy, you knew somebody of stature had come in.

Well, the town's full of people and I think we need to be casting our web wider in seeing about collaborations and

inviting people to come and and see what we do and talk with us and bring their special talents and viewpoints to bear.

And lastly, I want to say we enjoy a superb staff and we've already acknowledged them, but we can't acknowledge them too much. We have it

admin strong administrative staff teams and that's what we've seen for example do this event but we have strong technical staff teams and people who come here on sbaticals and as visitors

frequently go away saying what a great technical support enterprise you have here and I think we need to keep on honoring the contributions that they

make to us.

Now I want to spend the last half of my talk talking about my own blessings

as part of my life. And the biography is very very quick. Uh, surprisingly

enough, my parents were living here when I was born. I was born at Duke Hospital because there wasn't one here. And I

remember coming back after I'd come back to Chapel Hill as a faculty member giving a talk to an alumni group and this very dignified

gentleman in his 70s came up to me after the talk. This was in the

the talk. This was in the early 60s. And he said, "You don't know

early 60s. And he said, "You don't know me, but I know you." And I said, "How could that be?" And he said, "I'm the doctor followed your parents down the hill the night you were born.

My father was teaching biochemistry here and he decided he was teaching in the two-year medical he was teaching in the department of chemistry but his students went to two-year medical school

principally for biochemistry and he started taking those courses and decided he really liked medicine. So shortly

after I was born he went to medical school and finished his other two years and spent the rest of his life practicing medicine in Greenville. And

Greenville was peculiar because because there was a teachers college there. We

had exceptional teachers compared to other places in the state and that was a great blessing.

When I was 13, I was reading in the public library there at Shepherd Memorial Library and I read in a I think it was a Time magazine, may have been Newsweek had a

picture that one of these Art Zebashef drawings of the Harvard IBM Mark1 computer, you know, the little looked like a great big monster. Well, it was a

great big monster. It was the first American computer. Conrad Zuzu in

American computer. Conrad Zuzu in Germany had done a really working programmable computer earlier than that, but this was news to me. And as soon as I read that article, I knew this was

what I wanted to do in my life. I had

been busy interested in business machines simple-minded, you know, multicopy things and cards with just stuck needles

in to sort them and things like that up to then, but this this was it. And

and indeed, it has been just as satisfying as I expected. And so then I went to Duke and

expected. And so then I went to Duke and got a physics degree because that was on the way. and I went to Harvard and in

the way. and I went to Harvard and in fact Howard Aken was my dissertation advisor and that was a wonderful

experience. At Harvard the

experience. At Harvard the I met a girl the first Sunday night I was there and we'll get to that in a minute. Uh and

then lo and behold the next morning she was in the same complex variables class I was. It was Nancy Greenwood who was

I was. It was Nancy Greenwood who was doing a physics degree at Harvard and the rest is history.

It was my opportunity to to work with IBM for nine years. I had spent a summer there as a summer intern.

And the first machine I worked on was the world's fastest supercomput. We made

nine of them. We sold them for $10 million a piece. They went into the atomic energy commissions and the weather bureaus of France, Britain, and

the US.

This is about a thousand times faster, about 10,000 times as much memory, five times as many distinct IO devices

and channels, and cost $600.

But in the process I met what be has become a a close colleague and I'll say more later and that is Jerry Blau.

We were both working on the stretch system and he had done a PhD under Aken and had left and gone back to Holland because he'd been here on a fullbrite

and had to go back uh just before I got to Harvard. So he had graduated the spring before I got there in the fall. It was my opportunity also

to work on the harvest computer even though I was not the principal part of that architecture team. But I was the only one on the stretch team who was clearable to go talk to the people in

the on the harvest team because Jerry was Dutch and weren't a buck. Our boss

was German and so forth. And they they couldn't get the crypto clearances needed. And the harvest machine, it was

needed. And the harvest machine, it was an absolutely fascinating totally different kind of computer. It it most closely resembles a uh game card

machine. That is it's a streaming

machine. That is it's a streaming streaming data machine.

I had an opportunity to work on the 8000 series. We did a whole development of a

series. We did a whole development of a product line and it got killed and thank goodness it did. My advocacy was wrong and my opponent Bob Evans was right.

and then to lead the 360 project on both the hardware side and and the software side. While we were in Pipsy, we've had

side. While we were in Pipsy, we've had three children and that's a great great blessing. Kenneth, Roger, and Barbara.

blessing. Kenneth, Roger, and Barbara.

We now have nine grandchildren and that's great. And I've been here since '

that's great. And I've been here since ' 64 and that's been a great blessing. You

all have been a great blessing. So

now Holland Williams who's Holland stand up a said to me one day and I think this is a penetrating question. I always

wondered how a smart man like you could believe all that stuff and he was talking about the good news about Jesus Christ. And some of you have who've been

Christ. And some of you have who've been our students have wondered that but not articulated it nearly so bluntly as Collins did.

And it wasn't easy. And since it's the most valuable thing I could possibly tell you, I'm going to spend the rest of my talk telling you the answer to that question. How could you believe all that

question. How could you believe all that stuff?

Well, I was raised a churchman. My

parents were real Christians, but and you know, when I was 12, I went through the baptism ritual and so forth, but I

was not really a believer. And

my scientific education didn't help that much. And my Bible education at Duke

much. And my Bible education at Duke didn't help that at all.

My instructor who was an ordained minister was nevertheless his name was the same as Sears brand of manure spreader was was determined to make sure that

these naive kids got past their naive take in un in understanding religion. And so he spent the year I had

religion. And so he spent the year I had a semester of Old Testament and a semester of New Testament. And he spent the year giving us a a modern

enlightened year-long Bible course. So

by that time I was pretty skeptical.

Now being even a churchman, though not a Christian, was a big plus. And here's

why. That first

Sunday night at Harvard, like a good churchman, I was used to going to church. So you land here, you go over to

church. So you land here, you go over to where the Methodist Foundation is having a initial gathering of graduate students. So I go

over there. All right. Well, it turns

over there. All right. Well, it turns out it was another church, not a Christian. But

in the previous week, they had lined all the entering graduate school class up and given it to in two different auditori A through M and N through Z and

given us a test that must have been some psychology students PhD dissertation.

They needed needed data as best I could tell cuz you know it wasn't well they had us alphabetic and I was sitting on the front row and and it was one of these chemistry type auditori steep

steep bank and I finished the thing a little bit early and I turned around to see if there were any interesting girls in the crowd.

There were two and and then Sunday night this other churchman who's made there is one is one

of these two girls.

Well, I gravitated that way and she heard a southern accent and she gravitated this way. And next morning in the complex variables class, lo and behold, we turned out to be in the same

class and three years later was commencement on Thursday and a wedding on Saturday. And there it goes. So even

on Saturday. And there it goes. So even

being a churchman lives together.

And I observe that this girl had come by herself.

College girls, you know, don't do that very often. I thought this one is an

very often. I thought this one is an independent spirit. Yes.

independent spirit. Yes.

Now at IBM then was the next big step. I

was still a faithful churchman. Nancy

and I went to church every week. I was

bothered especially by the miracles in the Bible. You know this doesn't work

the Bible. You know this doesn't work with physics and but I was teamed at work with Jerry.

Well Jerry had the following characteristics. He as I say he was

characteristics. He as I say he was another one of Akin's PhDs.

He's very smart. He was a world-class computer architect whom I respected for his computer architecture capability and he was a deep Christian who had been

converted as part of his college experience. He had been through World

experience. He had been through World War II in hiding in the underground in Holland and had then come to the US for college.

And what Jerry and his wife did was one day he said, "We're going to have a bi B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B

Bible study at our house and we'd like to invite you and Nancy to come. And he

invited indeed the whole little architecture group.

Well, as Nancy says, if it had said it was going to be a Shakespeare study, we would have gone. All right. It it it was inherently an interesting proposition with a really interesting group of

people. And so we went

people. And so we went the methodology was very simple. The

insistence was that we look only at what the Bible says. We didn't use any commentaries or any other books, but we looked word by word closely.

We studied it intensely and we faced all the hard questions that the text raised in that process which went on for I guess two years before Nancy and I moved

to Westchester County to IBM research instead of product development.

The life and the person of Jesus Christ challenged me very deeply and you study it and you just have to be absolutely amazed.

But the real question for any scientist is is is this true?

And I would submit that's the only question for any scientist. Is this

true?

Well, what are the questions that are not relevant? One is, isn't this a wonderful

relevant? One is, isn't this a wonderful story inspiring hope? Uh, even a fool's hope. Another is, wasn't Jesus just a

hope. Another is, wasn't Jesus just a great moral teacher? And CS Lewis disposes of that by saying,

look at the claims he made to be the son of God.

Look, either he's crazy or he's lying or he's right.

Well, that's kind of a three- corner dilemma, but there you are.

And the other question is, do I like what I would have to do if I decide this is true? And I think more people are

is true? And I think more people are turned off by that question than any other. Do I like the consequences of

other. Do I like the consequences of giving my control of my life over to somebody else because I believe that is

the Lord of my life?

Well, I wrestled with this question hard and I I finally got the miracle sorted out. I came down to the conclusion that

out. I came down to the conclusion that if the resurrection of Jesus Christ is true, the other miracles of finger exercises. All right?

exercises. All right?

And as St. Paul says in the 15th chapter of 1 Corinthians, and if the resurrection of Christ is not true, the rest of it is garbage. Doesn't matter.

So that's really the only question you have to settle.

Well, I wrestled. I wrestled.

I wrestled for two hard years. I

wrestled with prayer. I wrestled with the prayer of my Nancy had been converted about a year and a half, I think, earlier, but she hadn't told me.

All right. And

the former Bible study group in Pikipsy was praying for me. She was praying for me. I was praying. And I studied then

me. I was praying. And I studied then closely the claims of Jesus Christ. And

especially I commend to you the Gospel of John in a modern translation. Don't

try to read the Bible in an old translation.

You want it in a language that's your language. And I found CS Lewis's books

language. And I found CS Lewis's books to be very helpful.

And I looked at the evidence of changed lives in people I knew. Really changed

lives.

And one day, and this is a supernatural gift, and I can't tell you how to get it except to wrestle, I suddenly knew it was true. And that assurance has never

was true. And that assurance has never left me. Now, this doesn't mean I don't

left me. Now, this doesn't mean I don't have any lack of sub questions, that I don't know any hard problems, that I don't have any difficult

matters to deal with. But the question of the fundamental truth of the Christian gospel has has always

I've been assured of that and that has provided great peace and great joy and life guidance. The whole question of

life guidance. The whole question of whether to come to Chapel Hill I wrestled with after I had become a Christian and the question I think is best phrased in the language Jerry Blau

used when he left IBM a year after I came here to go back to Holland to teach. And here's what he said the night

teach. And here's what he said the night he was giving his kind of farewell address at IBM.

He said, "We go because God is leading us, not supernaturally or in a dream, but by by Bible study, prayer, and

trying to understand what a man's life should be from his point of view.

Uh trying to understand what a man's life should be from God's point of view." That's a I think a very deep

view." That's a I think a very deep insight. Now

insight. Now the Christian gospel offers not only guidance but it offers immense hope and I won't go into that now for you. So

what the question I would leave you with is have you ever as an adult as an adult faced up to the question of

whether the claims of Jesus Christ are true.

And that's the most important question I can ask you and I thank you.

[Applause]