Ken Bowles
Computer science pioneer and UC San Diego professor emeritus Kenneth (Ken) Bowles passed away on August 15, 2018. He was 89.
Bowles made an enormous impact on computing. In the late 1970s, he helped lead efforts to create UCSD Pascal, which could run on virtually any computer system. Pascal influences many programming languages, including the now ubiquitous Java.
“The development of UCSD Pascal was a transformative event not just for UC San Diego but for all of computer science.” said Dean Tullsen, professor and chair of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the Jacobs School of Engineering. “It was arguably the first high-level programming system that worked on both small systems that schools, most businesses and eventually individuals could afford, and was portable across many systems.”
Bowles joined the UC San Diego faculty in 1965. During his 19-year tenure, he mentored many students and researchers, who went on to make breakthroughs of their own.
“Ken Bowles is part of the DNA of computer science and engineering here at UC San Diego,” said Tullsen.
Early in his career, Bowles recognized the importance of computing power as a radar physics theorist and engineer. He helped build and later directed the Jicamarca Radio Observatory in the desert outside Lima, Peru. His work at the observatory, as well as the National Bureau of Standards, required robust computing to study the Earth’s ionosphere and magnetosphere, his first encounters with computer science.
He was recognized for developing incoherent scatter radar, which he used to measure electron-density and temperature profiles in the high ionosphere when little was known about the processes driving weather.
Bowles was recruited to UC San Diego by Henry Booker, his former Ph.D. advisor at Cornell University. The two helped create the Applied Electrophysics Department which became the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Bowles directed the UC San Diego Computer Center from 1968 to 1974, then returned to his faculty position until his retirement. He continued to be active, helping create the standards for the Pascal-based Ada language.
Bowles is survived by his wife and three daughters. The Kenneth Bowles Scholarship in Computer Science and Engineering was established in 2004 to honor his legacy at UC San Diego.