[Chicago] Announcing the 2012 Distinctive Service Award - John Hunter

[Brian Curtin]

Here's what I mentioned at last night's meeting:
http://pyfound.blogspot.com/2012/09/announcing-2012-distinctive-service.html

For your convenience, the text of the post is included below.

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Announcing the 2012 Distinctive Service Award - John Hunter


The Distinctive Service Award

The Python Software Foundation voted unanimously on September 12, 2012
to authorize the creation of a new award: the Distinctive Service
Award (http://www.python.org/community/awards/psf-distinctive-awards).
The award is offered in recognition of long-term excellence in the
Python community, and is intended to stand as the Foundation's highest
honor. Whether for contributions of code, activism, evangelism, or for
other services to Python and its global community, the Foundation
seeks to honor those who have a record of sustained and prolific
giving to the Python world.

The award will not be made to a schedule, but as deserving candidates
emerge. It comes with a check for $5,000, in simple recognition of the
kind of devoted service for which the award will be presented.

Full details of the award, and a list of recipients, can be found on
the Foundation's awards page
(http://www.python.org/community/awards/psf-distinctive-award).

The First Recipient

The inaugural recipient of the Distinctive Service Award is John
Hunter, who passed away on August 28, 2012 after losing an
all-too-brief battle with colon cancer.

He is survived by his wife Miriam and three daughters Clara, Ava, and
Rahel. To mark his passing, the NumFOCUS Foundation has setup a
memorial fund for the care and education of his three daughters at
http://numfocus.org/johnhunter/.

John Hunter

There are few projects in the Python world which have enjoyed the
reach, longevity, and value that matplotlib (http://matplotlib.org/)
has offered in the 10 years since its creation. John Hunter, at the
time a post-doctoral neurobiologist at the University of Chicago,
started the matplotlib library as a way to work around downtime
created by limited licensing for expensive proprietary tools. His
choice to use Python was a bold one at the time, given Python's
relatively young age, especially within the sciences. However, his
efforts paid off and he was able to create an open alternative to
allow him to continue analyzing epileptic seizure data in children
without the limitations he was experiencing with other products.

Over time, John left the academic world and entered Chicago's finance
industry, taking employment at TradeLink Securities. While there, he
took his science background and matplotlib project into the field of
quantitative analysis. In the ten years since matplotlib's creation,
John brought three daughters into the world and cared for his family
all while maintaining the number one spot on the matplotlib committer
list. He became further involved in the numeric and scientific
communities, presenting at conferences and expanding his involvement
to the recently formed NumFOCUS Foundation, at which he was a founding
board member.

John's creation and contribution of matplotlib to not just the Python
community, but to the science and mathematics communities, is truly an
effort that will live on and continue to influence these communities
and more for many years to come. Whether you found Python through
matplotlib or matplotlib through Python, John Hunter's efforts have
left a lasting mark on so many people in so many places.

In addition to the Distinctive Service Award, the Foundation will be
contributing $3500 to a project which is currently in the works, the
John Hunter Technical Fellowship. More details on this will follow.