Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Hull, Thomas E.
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1922-1996
History
Thomas Hull, a native of Winnipeg, first came to the University of Toronto as a student from which he graduated with his B.A. in applied mathematics in 1944, an M.A. in Physics and Meteorology in 1946 and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 1949. Upon graduation he took a teaching position at the University of British Columbia where he taught for 15 years and is accredited with having established Computer Science as a discipline. He returned to the University of Toronto in 1964 and held a cross appointment to the new Computer Science Department and the Department of Mathematics. From 1968-1974 he served as chair of the former department and was instrumental in attracting a number of leading scholars, with the result that by the mid 1970s the University of Toronto Computer Science Department was widely acknowledge as one of the top ten in North America.
His research interests included mainly numerical analysis and, in his late career, issues of numerical software and programming language. He was a member of various professional associations and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He died on August 15 1996.