Duncan Buell

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Memoirs of a Computer Scientist

Memoir of a Computer Scientist records thoughts of a computer scientist, now retired, who has been doing programming for various applications since 1969. Duncan Buell presents his recollections of the nature of the computing discipline over those decades. As he writes:

“I would like to think my career has been a career of ‘doing’ and not of “talking about doing.’ My early background in computational number theory was of that nature—it was not enough to claim a better algorithm; it was necessary to use the allegedly better algorithm to compute something that had not previously been computable. I don’t mind mucking about in the data, whether the data is a set of student essays or the results from an election. In that I would like to think I am a scientist.”

Biography

DUNCAN A. BUELL received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1976. He has taught at Carleton University, Bowling Green State University, and Louisiana State University. From 1986 to 2000 he worked on high performance computing and computational mathematics at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Maryland in support of the National Security Agency. In 1997 was part of a team that received a Meritorious Unit Citation from Director of Central Intelligence for “a stunning achievement” that required the largest single computation ever made in the US intelligence community. In 2000, he joined the University of South Carolina as a professor, serving nine years as chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a year as interim dean of the college. He retired in January 2021 and is now the Chair Emeritus of the NCR Chair in Computer Science and Engineering. In 2019, he was appointed to the Commission on Voter Registration and Elections of Richland County, South Carolina. His research interests are electronic voting, digital humanities, and text analysis..

Publication: Winter 2026