My favorite professor in college was a young guy named Dan Cooke. At the time, he had studied at Texas A&M under Dr. Jack Barnes. Barnes had brought Dan with him to help launch the Computer Science degree at Hardin-Simmons University. He was young, enthusiastic and very smart AND a really good instructor. I took a number of classes from him including Assembly Language. He introduced me to his brother who was the lead engineer on developing the joy-stick controls for the Space Shuttle. I remained close friends with him as he got his PhD in artificial intelligence… and once he left for UTEP. Later, he became the top dog at Texas Tech and spent a considerable amount of time at JPL working with NASA.
A few years ago, Dan gave me and my son, Jake, a personal tour of a new parallel-processing control language he had developed that was in the process of revolutionizing the control languages used by NASA to handle flight control.
Tonight, while watching all of the people at JPL celebrate the landing of Curiosity on Mars, I couldn’t help but be a little sad in the midst of the excitement. In late 2010, Dan took his own life. I don’t know the details, even though I’m still looking to learn what can be known. Bottom line, he was a troubled guy. I don’t know for sure, but there does seem to be a tie to genius and unhappiness.
Here’s a link to an article written by Dan in 2006 talking about the exciting changes to come on the horizon as he described the basics of the language Jake and I saw demo’d by him in his office.
Here’s to Dan. Here’s to all of his work and his buddies at JPL and NASA. Here’s to Curiosity! It’s a truly amazing thing that’s already been accomplished just by landing that thing!!! I’m guessing a number of the people I saw on TV this evening dancing around, smiling and hugging at JPL – just a few minutes ago – would have known Dan personally. I wished he could have been part of the party.