David Harris

I have enjoyed reading all of the recollections of all of your experiences with Glen, and want to add a little of mine.

I too accidentally met Glen; I think it was because I needed computing for my research in spectroscopy and he was the man to talk to. I discovered the OLS when it was on the RW400, and was absolutely delighted with it. With Glen's help I received an NSF grant to link about 8 other sites including Washington state University, Georgia Tech, U. Missouri, Florida State, U. Minn. and ? (This may have been an example of Glen's principle of "be careful of what you ask for..."). The idea was to see if the OLS would be useful for teaching chemistry. It was, but at the time the cost of terminals and the phone lines was too high. It is too bad that Glen was ahead of the time in that other technology was adopted before the costs became reasonable.

Of the papers I have published, the one most cited is one that resulted directly from the OLS. I think that the major attribute of the OLS was not so much its computational power or ease of use, but its ability to stimulate new ways of thinking about a problem. A general problem in molecular dynamics is called isomerization which is the interconversion of one conformation of a molecule to another. For example, the first step in vision involves an isomerization, but the general problem is important in a very large number of other contexts.

The quantum mechanical dynamical problem has both kinetic and potential energy parts, each of which depends on the coordinate in a complicated way with multiple independent parameters. One day I was playing with the OLS trying to understand what the devil the EVAL operator was good for and why it had been included as part of the repertoire when WOW I realized that it was very useful indeed. To make the story short, it enabled me to get rid of all of the coordinate dependence of the kinetic energy and fold it into the potential energy with no loss in generality or accuracy. As I have already noted I believe that the real power of the system that Glen created was its ability to stimulate new ways of thinking. But as many of you have noted, even those of you who didn't use the OLS were stimulated by Glen's intellegence and enthusiasm.

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