JupyterCon 2020 keynote speaker announcement

Benjamin Ragan Kelley

It all started in April 2005 when freshman Min RK reached out to his physics professor, Brian Granger,

Dr. Granger,
Talking to you this afternoon prompted me to put the rather vague idea I had into a less vague writing, so I thought I would send you a better explanation of the application I had in mind…

laying out his vision for an interactive development environment for computational physics. Reading this today, we can see how prescient that vision was, and included key elements of what Jupyter has become.

Min then joined Brian and Fernando in contributing to IPython and became one of the main driving forces behind a project that has grown to global prominence, with a lasting influence on the entire field of scientific computing.

Some of Min's early experiments for a web-based notebook.

The rest is history, Min has spent the following fifteen years contributing to IPython and Jupyter. We owe him some of the key components of the project such as JupyterHub. He was honored along with the rest of the Jupyter steering council with the 2017 ACM Software System Award.

Today, Min is a senior research engineer and the head of the Department of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing at the Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway.

Beyond Jupyter, he has contributed widely to open source software, especially in the scientific Python community. He helps maintain numerous scientific packages in the conda-forge package management system.