From the Product Example to PDE Adjoints, Algorithmic Differentiation and Its Application (Invited Talk)

At the last conference on algorithmic or automatic differentiation (AD) in July 2012, Bert Speelpenning gave a very entertaining account of his pioneering work in the field. After finishing his thesis titled Compiling fast partial derivatives of functions given by algorithms at Urbana Champain in 1981 he had dropped from sight of the scientific community and spent a few decades in the software industry working amongst others for Oracle and Microsoft.