I was born in Wenatchee (we-NAT-chee), Washington, the beautiful heart of the apple country of eastern Washington, at the confluence of the mighty Columbia with the Wenatchee River. The date was 1935, as the depression was winding down, and the War was winding up. (For people my age, there was only one War with a capital "W", World War II.) I was followed by sister Gail, and brothers Terry and Lee, the latter of whom was born only a few months before Pearl Harbor. Our Dad, Roy Motteler, served during the War as a Naval officer, sailing the Caribbean and the North Atlantic as commander of a gun crew on merchant ships.
We moved around a lot during those days. I attended kindergarten and the first two grades at Whitman School in Wenatchee, the same school (and the same building) that Dad had attended. The building no longer exists, and Wenatchee no longer has a school by that name. I interrupted the second grade to attend school for some weeks in Forks, Washington. My Dad's parents lived near Forks, where my grandfather was president of the Forks Shingle Mill. Mom, needing help with four little ones, stayed with them while Dad was at the Great Lakes Training Center. After that he was assigned to Farragut Naval Training Station near Sandpoint, Idaho, and we moved there and spent the last half of 1943, where I attended third grade at Farmin School. That school building was razed long ago, but the house we lived in is still standing, though now occupied by a business, due to its proximity to downtown.
During the calendar year 1944 and part of 1945, we again lived at the shingle mill, and I attended the rest of third grade and part of fourth at the Forks School. It was pretty much a family affair. My great aunt Mae Huling (who was also my first cousin once removed, as she was my grandfather's neice) drove the school bus. And during fourth grade my teacher was Marjorie Motteler, the wife of our cousin Oral Motteler. Marjorie was a sweet person, who died too young, of cancer.
After returning from overseas, Dad was assigned to the Port Director's office in Portland, Oregon, for the duration of the war, being discharged from active duty at the beginning of 1946. I attended Sitton School in northwest Portland, which was so crowded that classes ran in two shifts. After Dad's discharge, we moved to Olympia, to live in a house left to my mother by her Aunt Mildred Stanford. I attended Lincoln School, and after the eighth grade, went on to OHS.
I graduated from Willam Winlock Miller High School in Olympia,
Washington (better known as Olympia
High School) 
in 1953. This was the same high school which had been attended by my mother (Betty Stanford) in the 1920's. The building no longer exists; it has long since been torn down and replaced by a large state office building (the main capitol building complex is right across the street). During my high school years, I was manager of the football team, Boys' Club President, and a delegate to Evergreen Boys' State. I was also a member of the honor society and graduated as valedictorian of my class.
As an undergraduate, I attended Stanford University, where I majored in mathematics. I was fortunate enough to have had some of the century's greatest mathematicians as teachers during my undergradute and graduate studies there: Harold Bacon, Paul Berg, Gabor Szegö, Paul Garabedian, Peter Lax, Erhard Heinz, David Gilbarg, Karel DeLeeuw (a kindly and wonderful man who was bludgeoned to death by one of my erstwhile classmates), Gordon Latta, Menahem Schiffer. I graduated with great distinction and received a National Science Foundation Fellowship for graduate study. I chose the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis for graduate work, even though I had been admitted to Harvard. In retrospect, I made the right choice, because Harvard's brand of mathematics was too abstract for me.
I have been in computing since 1957, when I joined the staff at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a summer student fresh out of Stanford. I went to work at LANL full time in 1958, after a year at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. I had been very unhappy there. LANL sent me back to school at Stanford 1961-1963, first on leave without pay, and generously supported me with full 
pay the last year. Then, when I returned to the Lab, they paid me while I wrote my dissertation, and I received my Ph. D. in mathematics in March, 1964. (At that time computer science was in its infancy as a discipline, and although they had a graduate program at Stanford, it was primarily numerical analysis, a field in which I had been working with the pioneers for some years and did not particularly want--or need--a degree.)
After
returning to LANL for a couple of years, I became interested in escaping from the Lab atmosphere of shoving computer listings back and forth across my desk, and thanks to my high school classmate John Firkins, who was (and recently retired as) a mathematics professor at Gonzaga University, a small and high quality Jesuit university in Spokane, Washington, I entered an academic career in 1965 that lasted the next 28 years of my life. I joined the faculty at Gonzaga as assistant professor, and left seven years later as a full professor, having served as department chair for much of that time, and having introduced the first computer science courses into the curriculum.
I
moved to Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan in 1972, as head of the Department of Mathematics, which became the Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences after I founded the computer science program there (Computer Science is now a separate department).
During
academic year 1980-1981, I went on sabbatical to Michigan State University, where as visiting lecturer I taught a junior level sequence in computer architecture and operating systems and simultaneously earned a research M. S. in computer science, which has been my sole field of endeavor ever since.
In 1982 I left the cold and snowy north country for the balmy semi-tropical area of San Luis Obispo, California, home of California Polytechnic State University, better known as Cal Poly. I served there as a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and for the last two years as coordinator of the Computer Engineering Program, until my retirement in 1993, when I went to work for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a senior computer scientist. I retired from LLNL July 1, 2000, but continued my professional activities with the Computing Accreditation Commission (CAC) of ABET, the body which accredits undergraduate computer science and information systems programs. I was chair of CAC during 2000-2001, and past chair for 2001-2002. I have now retired from this activity and am free to pursue my hobbies.
Return to home page.
This page created with the help of Netscape Composer