Bill Press' Home Page
Bill Press (also indexed on the web as William Press and William H. Press) is the Leslie Surginer Professor in Computer Science and in Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. His affiliations at UT include memberships in the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology (ICMB) and in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ODEN). Press is also a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the Statistical Sciences group (CCS-6). His research is on computational biology, genomics, and computational statistical methods. Prior to June, 2004, he served for five years as LANL's Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology. Before that, he was for twenty years Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Harvard University, and a member of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Press was a member of President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology from 2009 to 2017 and was reappointed to this White House council by President Biden in 2021. (PCAST).


Bill's present and previous work touches several different communities: You might know him as a computational biologist and computer scientist, or earlier as a theoretical astrophysicist, or else you might know him as the co-author and (in his off hours) co-maintainer of the Numerical Recipes series of books on scientific computer programming. (He is further involved in other professional activities.)

Bill's autobiographical memoir, More Than Curious: A Science Memoir was published by Darwin-Finch in 2023 under a Creative Commons license that makes the electronic version free to read or download.

No relation to a different Bill Press whom you might see as a political commentator on cable television.

Contact Information  
  • Email:
  • Fax (remember that?):     +512 471-8694
  • Phone: +512 232-4022    (Sorry, I can't help you with Numerical Recipes problems. Instead, look here.)
  • Or, as a last resort, mail: 
       Prof. William Press
   Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences
   POB 4.102
   1 University Station (C0200)
   Austin, TX 78712 (U.S.A.)

Professional Information

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