Anil Nerode is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Mathematics. He joined the Cornell Math Department in 1959. His interests are in mathematical logic, the theory of automata, computability and complexity theory, the calculus of variations, distributed systems, and artificial intelligence. CS people know him for the very early Myhill–Nerode theorem, which gives necessary and sufficient conditions for a formal language to be regular.

Anil has long been a friend of CS. He was acting director of the Center for Applied Math from 1964-1965, when the formation of the CS Department was underway. That put him on the committee that worked to start the CS Department. He was the one who suggested Juris Hartmanis for the first chair of CS and, about 35 years later, he said that Juris “was far and away the best chairman of any department”.

In this interview, Anil and interviewer David Gries discuss the start of the CS department.

Running Time: 55 min. http://hdl.handle.net/1813/40527