Dan Zuras received his degree in mathematics from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1975.
For nearly 23 years, he worked at Hewlett-Packard primarily on floating-point applications in both hardware and software. For the last 7 years he worked at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and later Agilent Labs on the design of new analytical instruments. Along the way, besides designing one of the first three IEEE-754 floating-point chips at HP and writing the first transcendental functions library to use them, he has also made contributions to cryptography, error-correcting codes, symbolic algebra, ion optics, ink jet heads, optical switches, and, inadvertently, silicon art.
Outside of HP, Dan is chairman of the IEEE-754 Revisions Committee , a machinist, and president and founding member of Group-70: A non-profit organization that is building a 70 inch telescope.
Since retiring from Agilent in 2000, he has devoted most of his time to the telescope which he STILL hopes to finish in his lifetime.