engineering

Marilyn Wolf

Marilyn Wolf is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Marilyn Wolf rather than just read about it. In short: Marilyn Claire Wolf (born April 12, 1958) is an American computer engineer who works as Elmer E. Koch Professor of Engineering and Founding Director of the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Key takeaways

Marilyn Wolf belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Marilyn Wolf to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Marilyn Wolf from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Marilyn Claire Wolf (born April 12, 1958) is an American computer engineer who works as Elmer E. Koch Professor of Engineering and Founding Director of the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is an expert in embedded computing.

Education and career Wolf attended Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree there in 1980, a master's degree in 1981, and a doctorate in 1984. After working at Bell Labs from 1984 to 1989, she joined the Princeton University faculty, and was on the Georgia Tech faculty from 2007 to 2019. At Georgia Tech, she was the Rhesa "Ray" S. Farmer, Jr., Distinguished Chair in Embedded Computing Systems and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. From 1999 to 2000, Wolf was editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems, and from 2001 to 2007, Wolf was editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing. She is the author of the textbooks Computers as Components: Principles of Embedded Computing System Design (3rd ed., Elsevier, 2012) and High Performance Embedded Computing (2nd ed., Morgan Kaufmann, 2014).

Recognition In 1998, she was elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and in 2001 she was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to embedded computing." In 2018, Marilyn Wolf became a literal action figure. As part of a project to encourage girls in STEM, she was featured in a collection of figurines of prominent female scientists and engineers. She received the IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Memorial Award in 2019 for contributions to embedded, hardware-software co-design, and real-time computer vision systems. She received the IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award in 2022 for her inspirational teaching of graduate students.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Marilyn Wolf

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Marilyn Wolf claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Marilyn Wolf before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Marilyn Wolf ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Marilyn Wolf

In research: Marilyn Wolf appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Marilyn Wolf in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Marilyn Wolf is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 20th-century American engineers, 20th-century American scientists, 20th-century American women engineers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Marilyn Wolf outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Marilyn Wolf in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Marilyn Wolf means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Marilyn Wolf out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Marilyn Wolf in simple terms?

Why does Marilyn Wolf matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Marilyn Wolf?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Marilyn Wolf.