Richard Mattson

Mattson was born in Greeley, Colorado. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1957, with honors in electrical engineering. He became a student of Bernard Widrow at Stanford University, where he completed his doctorate in 1962. His dissertation was The Analysis and Synthesis of Adaptive Systems Which Use Networks of Threshold Elements. He then became a faculty member at Stanford himself, before moving to IBM Research in 1965. While at Stanford, he supervised two doctoral students, John Hopcroft and Yale Patt, both of whom themselves became notable computer scientists, and he has many academic descendants through both of them.