User:Quantumdoug/Doug Matzke

Doug Matzke (born 1953) was interested in computers since high school, when he started programming computers (late 1960s). He describes his interests related to the "limits of computers" and "limit of computing", especially related to computation models of human brain and mind. His professional career is a set of work that can be tied together based on this common thread.

His educational background includes a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering (emphasis on computer architecture and programming) from University of Wisconsin, Madison in Dec 1975. He earned his Masters degree in Electrical Engineering (emphasis on biofeedback) from University of Texas, Austin in Dec 1980, while working at Texas Instruments. His Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering was earned in May 2002 from University of Texas, Dallas with dissertation on "Quantum Computation using Geometric Algebra".

Matzke worked from 1976 to 2001 at Texas Instruments, much of of this time at the research labs in Dallas. During that period he organized two workshops to explore the relationship between Physics and Computing, with over 100 people attending both conferences. These workshops were given the names PhysComp92 and PhysComp94. These workshops were attended by Tom Toffoli how was a pioneer in quantum computing (see Toffoli Gate) and cellular automata from MIT. Toffoli originally organized a similar conference in 1981 at MIT (which was then dubbed as PhysComp81 and then also hosted PhysComp96 at Boston University.

Another related work by Matzke was the special issue of Computer Magazine dubbed the "Billion Transistor Computer" issue. His paper was the lead off article that described how computers won't continue to scale since wires will stop scaling.