Education
California Institute of Technology.
California Institute of Technology.
He came from a middle-class family and had diabetes. As "Dan Forrester" he is a prominent character in Lucifer"s Hammer. Alderson did not write science fiction himself, but for his own amusement created the imaginary planet of Wibblefubwilda, a planet where everyone gets his heart"s desire.
He died at an early age from complications of diabetes.
He is remembered as a patron saint of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, which honored his memory with a parking space reserved in his name in front of their clubhouse until they moved to a new location without dedicated parking. Alderson devised a Fortran program (called TRAM for Trajectory Monitor) for navigation in the Solar System, still used by low-thrust craft in 2008.
When Alderson lost his vision to diabetic complications, he was able to continue working at Jet Propulsion Laboratory by dictating to an unpaid "seeing eye person." Before he was forced to retire due to medical reasons, he created a complex subroutine package (Portable NameList) in Fortran, strictly by dictation. He organized things so well that he was able to create a number of secondary subroutines and functions, keeping all arguments in a strict order to avoid confusion.
Alderson was a confirmed night owl.
lieutenant was well known at Jet Propulsion Laboratory that, if you saw him at his desk at 8 Department of Administration and Management, he"d been there all night. As his health failed, he paid less and less attention to the time, sometimes leaving for a 3 Prime Minister appointment at 3:30 Prime Minister.
A member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, an Official Editor of the comic book APA CAPA-alpha, and an early member of gaming fandom, he came into contact with a number of science fiction writers, notably Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, who, in their books, cr Dan Alderson with ideas that inspired some of their science fiction, notably the Alderson drive and the Alderson disk.