Milos Konopasek
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Milos Konopasek, a native of the former Czechoslovakia, was best known as the creator of TK Solver, an iterative constraint-based declarative environment for solving systems of equations. TK Solver was developed by Software Arts as a successor to the company's first product VisiCalc - the world's first computer spreadsheet. During his stint as a researcher at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, in the late 60's and early 70's, he developed a program with an arcane name "Question-Answering System on Mathematical Models" or QAS for short. QAS evolved into TK Solver in 1982.
The audience, in Konopasek's engineering/scientific mind, was supposed to cover a broad category of non-computer professionals and non-mathematicians applying math to their fields. He recognized early on the budding personal computer as an ideal vehicle for bringing his concept to the masses.
Both TK Solver and QAS before it, were revolutionary in two simple but critical ways:
- Users could enter any equations in any order, without the need to explicitly isolate target variables on one side of the equation.
- Once a model had been built, the user could set any variable as either an input or output and the software would automatically solve for unknowns, assuming the model was sufficiently constrained.
Konopasek graduated from the Leningrad Textile Institute, Leningrad, USSR, and received the Ph.D. and D.Sc degrees from the University of Manchester, Manchester, England.
He held the role of Senior Scientist at Software Arts, Wellesley, MA while holding a visiting faculty position at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Previously he held a number of management, research, and teaching positions in Czechoslovakia, United Kingdom, and the United States, the most recent at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, and North Carolina State University, Raleigh.
After Software Arts fell into financial difficulty and was sold to Lotus Software, TK Solver was purchased by Universal Technical Systems of Rockford, IL. Konopasek served the remainder of his career as Vice President of UTS. TK Solver is still developed and sold by UTS today.
The bulk of his research interests and contributions have been in textile engineering, applied mechanics, operations research, and computer science, in areas as diverse as CAD/CAM, large deflection analysis of slender bodies, topology of line structures, and language design. Konopasek is a member of ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.
Milos Konopasek died in Boston on 9 January 2002.
