Stephen Warshall

Stephen Warshall (15 November 1935 to 11 December 2006) was an American computer scientist who carried out research and development in operating systems, compiler design, language design and operations research. He is remembered for the transitive closure algorithm now called Warshall's algorithm; the story goes that he and a colleague at Technical Operations bet a bottle of rum on who could first settle whether it always works, and he proved it overnight. Warshall was born in New York City, went to public school in Brooklyn, and graduated from A.B. Davis High School in Mount Vernon, New York. He attended Harvard University and received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1956, but never took an advanced degree because no programs then covered his interests. He worked at the Operations Research Office run by Johns Hopkins for the United States Army, then at Technical Operations, and in 1961 he founded Massachusetts Computer Associates, which later became part of Applied Data Research. He retired from that company in 1982.