Norman E. Gibbs was an American software engineer, scholar and educational leader.

He studied to a B.Sc. in mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 at Ursinus College

Ursinus College

Ursinus College is a liberal arts college in Collegeville, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.-History:1867Members of the German Reformed Church begin plans to establish a college where "young men could be liberally educated under the benign influence of Christianity." These founders were hoping to...

 (1964) and M.Sc. (1966) and Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 (1969) in Computer Science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at Purdue University

Purdue University

Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...

, advised by Robert R. Korfhage

Robert R. Korfhage

Robert Roy Korfhage was an American computer scientist, famous for his contributions to information retrieval and several textbooks....

. His research area was cycle generation, an area in graph theory

Graph theory

In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs, mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection. A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices or 'nodes' and a collection of edges that connect pairs of...

.
Gibbs joined the faculty at Bowdoin College

Bowdoin College

Bowdoin College , founded in 1794, is an elite private liberal arts college located in the coastal Maine town of Brunswick, Maine. As of 2011, U.S. News and World Report ranks Bowdoin 6th among liberal arts colleges in the United States. At times, it was ranked as high as 4th in the country. It is...

 in Maine

Maine

Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...

, Arizona State University

Arizona State University

Arizona State University is a public research university located in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area of the State of Arizona...

 and College of William and Mary

College of William and Mary

The College of William & Mary in Virginia is a public research university located in Williamsburg, Virginia, United States...

 (mathematics) in Virginia

Virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...

 before moving to Pittsburgh, joining Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

 as professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 of computer science and becoming the first director of the educational program at the Software Engineering Institute

Software Engineering Institute

The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute is a federally funded research and development center headquartered on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. SEI also has offices in Arlington, Virginia, and Frankfurt, Germany. The SEI operates...

 (1987-97). Since then he was chief information officer

Chief information officer

Chief information officer , or information technology director, is a job title commonly given to the most senior executive in an enterprise responsible for the information technology and computer systems that support enterprise goals...

 at Guilford College

Guilford College

Guilford College, founded in 1837 by members of the Religious Society of Friends , is an independent college whose stated mission is to: provide a transformative, practical and excellent liberal arts education that produces critical thinkers in an inclusive, diverse environment, guided by Quaker...

 in Greensboro and University of Connecticut

University of Connecticut

The admission rate to the University of Connecticut is about 50% and has been steadily decreasing, with about 28,000 prospective students applying for admission to the freshman class in recent years. Approximately 40,000 prospective students tour the main campus in Storrs annually...

, jointly serving as professor of Operations and Information management. He eventually worked for Ball State University

Ball State University

Ball State University is a state-run research university located in Muncie, Indiana. It is also known as Ball State or simply BSU.Located on the northwest side of the city, Ball State's campus spans and includes 106 buildings...

 as chair of computer science (2000-02).

Articles

• A cycle generation algorithm for finite undirected linear graphs, in Jnl. of the ACM, 16(4):564-68, 1969.
• Tridiagonalization by permutations, in Comm. of the ACM, 17(1):20-24, 1974 (with William G. Poole, jr.)
• Basic cycle generation, in Comm. of the ACM, 18(5):275-76, 1975
• An Algorithm for Reducing the Bandwidth and Profile of a Sparse Matrix, in SIAM Jnr. of Numerical Analysis, 13(2):236-250, 1976 (with W. G. Poole and Paul K. Stockmeyer
• A hybrid profile reduction algorithm, ACM Trans. on Math. Softw., 2(4):378-387, 1976
• An introductory computer science course for all majors, ACM SIGCSE, 9(3):34-38, 1977
• A model curriculum for a liberal arts degree in computer science, Comm. of the ACM, 29(3):202-210, 1986 (with Allen B. Tucker)
• A Master of Software Engineering Curriculum: Recommendations from the Software Engineering Institute, IEEE Computer, 22(9):59-71, 1989 (With Gary A. Ford)
• Software Engineering and Computer Science: The Impending Split?, in Educ. & Computing. 7(1-2):111-17, 1991

Books

• Principles of data structures and algorithms with Pascal ((William C. Brown Publ.,1987). With Robert R. Korfhage
  Robert R. Korfhage
  Robert Roy Korfhage was an American computer scientist, famous for his contributions to information retrieval and several textbooks....
  
  
• Software Engineering Education: The Educational Needs of the Software Community (editor, with Richard E. Farley, 1987)