John Wolberg – jrwolberg@gmail.com
John Wolberg was born in New York City in 1936 and was raised in Mount Vernon, New York. His parents were Sidney and Beatrice (Bernstein) Wolberg. His sister Jane was born in 1938.
He graduated from A.B. Davis High School in 1953 and then went on to Cornell University where he studied Mechanical Engineering. He graduated from the five-year program in 1958 and then started graduate studies at MIT. He graduated with a PhD in Nuclear Engineering in 1962.
He was married to Laurie Holbreich (whom he had met at Cornell) in June 1959. Their first child, Beth was born in Boston on the last day of 1961. Upon completing his oral exams for his doctorate, John left for Israel in February 1962 where he had accepted a two year position as a lecturer in Nuclear Engineering at the Technion in Haifa. Upon arriving in Israel he was immediately enrolled in an ulpan course to learn Hebrew. Laurie and Beth followed several months later. In the fall of 1962 he started teaching and doing research.
In 1965 he took a leave of absence in the United States. That year he lectured at NYU and worked at Burndy Corporation. Laurie and John’s first son, David was born in September of 1965 in NYC. John had been promoted to Senior Lecturer at the Technion and the Wolberg family returned to Israel in January 1967. John’s first book, Prediction Analysis, was published by Van Nostrand in 1967. Their second son, Daniel, was born in Haifa at the end of August, 1968. In the fall of 1968 John transferred from Nuclear Engineering to Mechanical Engineering.
John was promoted to Associate Professor in 1969 and inducted into the IDF in June of the same year. Upon completion of basic training John joined the family in the United States where they started a sabbatical leave. John again worked at Burndy Corp and also worked on a book: Application of Computers to Engineering Analysis that was published by McGraw Hill in 1971. While at Burndy he developed a program called SPREAD (Spring Evaluation Analysis and Design) for use in the development of contact springs. The program was offered commercially on the NCSS time sharing network. He also participated in research at the Nuclear Medicine Department at Yale Medical School. While on that sabbatical leave their second daughter, Tamar was born in NYC. The family returned to Haifa in January 1971. Up to that point they had been living in rented apartments. They bought a house in the Ahuza district of Haifa and moved into it at the end of August 1971.
Shortly after moving into the new house John was sent on an army course to learn to be a rubber boat operator in the battle engineers. He spent a memorable month on the Sea of Galilee at the course. The unit was called up for a second course in 1972 and additional training shortly before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The unit was activated immediately upon the outbreak of hostilities on Oct 6, 1973 and was sent to the Sinai Desert the next day. The unit brought the first paratroopers across the Suez Canal on the night of October 15th and stayed in the Canal Zone until the end of February 1974. John returned to academic life after been demobilized. He continued to serve in the reserves with the same unit until he was released in 1986. He spent his last four years of military service (one month per year) with the unit in the Gaza Strip.
John took a sabbatical leave in 1975 and continued working on several commercial software projects that were offered on the NCSS time sharing network. Besides SPREAD, John developed REGRESS that was also offered commercially on the system. While at NCSS he started work on a project with OLI Systems on the conversion of computer software. At the end of the sabbatical year the family returned to Israel and he continued his work on software to automate the software conversion process. He continued his relationship with OLI during the summers and started a consulting firm based in Israel that specialized in software conversions. John was promoted to Full Professor in 1979. His third book, Conversion of Computer Software, was published by Prentice Hall in 1983. This book was translated into Japanese in 1988.
In 1986 John started working with Raden Research in the area of computer software for financial market modeling. The work with Raden continued for the summers and sabbatical leaves from the Technion for about 15 years and involved consulting and software development for some of the largest traders using software prediction modeling. The FKR program resulted from this effort. John’s fourth book, Expert Trading Systems, Modeling Financial Markets with Kernel Regress was published by Wiley in 2000.
In October 2004 John became a Professor Emeritus at the Technion but continued to teach and do research. He finished his fifth book that year: Data Analysis Using the Method of Least Squares, published by Springer-Verlag in 2006. This book is the results of his experiences with the REGRESS program and with users of REGRESS. His latest book, Designing Quantitative Experiments was published in 2010, also by Springer-Verlag.
In March 2016 Laurie Wolberg died after a long and difficult illness, Blessed be her memory and may she rest in peace.