Philip J. Kiviat (born October 15, 1937) is noted, along with
Alan Pritsker
A. Alan B. Pritsker (February 5, 1933—August 24, 2000) was an American engineer, pioneer in the field of Operations research, and one of the founders of the field of computer simulation. Over the course of a fifty-five-year career, he made ...
,
for half a century of work on
computer simulation
Computer simulation is the process of mathematical modelling, performed on a computer, which is designed to predict the behaviour of, or the outcome of, a real-world or physical system. The reliability of some mathematical models can be dete ...
.
Biography
Kiviat studied at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
from 1955-1961.
While working from 1961-1963 for
U.S. Steel Corporation
United States Steel Corporation, more commonly known as U.S. Steel, is an American integrated steel producer headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with production operations primarily in the United States of America and in several countries ...
he pioneered the development of the original
GASP
Paralanguage, also known as vocalics, is a component of meta-communication that may modify meaning, give nuanced meaning, or convey emotion, by using techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. It is sometimes defined as relati ...
software, which was later enhanced by
Alan Pritsker
A. Alan B. Pritsker (February 5, 1933—August 24, 2000) was an American engineer, pioneer in the field of Operations research, and one of the founders of the field of computer simulation. Over the course of a fifty-five-year career, he made ...
to form ''GASP II''. After moving to
RAND Corporation
The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed ...
in 1964, Kiviat worked with
Harry Markowitz to produce
SIMSCRIPT II.
His subsequent work at the 1972-founded
Federal Systems Integration and Management Center (FEDSIM) earned him recognition as "the simulation czar of the federal government."
[
He is also known for the eponymous '' Kiviat Graph'' (also identified as a ''Kiviat diagram'', ''Kiviat chart'', ''Polar chart'' or ]Radar chart
A radar chart is a graphical method of displaying multivariate data in the form of a two-dimensional chart of three or more quantitative variables represented on axes starting from the same point. The relative position and angle of the axes is ...
).
View of the future
In a 2013 interview about the future of simulation software in the hands of non-professionals, he said "I saw above the door to the MIT simulation lab back in the early 1960s which was SINSFIT - Simulation is No Substitute For Intelligent Thinking."["American computer executive"]
References
1937 births
Living people
External links
Guide to the Philip J. Kiviat Papers 1962-2010
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