Neither LLNL nor UCDavis had a satisfactory webpage scheme (LLNL classification problems and UCDavis budget problems made life complicated) while I was there. I thought it best to put together my own (with the encouragement and help of my computer-wise son, Nathan Edgar Hoover).   The underlying motivation is to indicate those things which interest me deeply in hopes of resonating with kindred spirits.  My wife Carol Griswold Hoover and I particularly enjoy those beautiful places where the population density is low and the elevation is high.  Hence, our current new home in Ruby Valley, Nevada.  Carol finally bid the Lab adieu in June of 2005.  We became involved in some pedagogical computational work with students from Elko and Spring Creek, Nevada, but found, after two years' of these projects that their training was inadequate. So we are "really retired" and on vacation, just doing an occasional calculation for fun and having more time for travel, gardening, and playing with the horses.

I have been enthusiastic about using computers to solve otherwise-intractable mechanics problems ever since I read Berni Alder and Tom Wainwright's (1959) Scientific American article: "Molecules in Motion". After ten years' study of equilibrium problems at the "Rad Lab" (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's earliest nickname) I switched over to the exploration of nonequilibrium problems.  Nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (as detailed by Bill Ashurst, my first PhD student, in his 1974 dissertation) was applied to a variety of flow problems, involving both solids and fluids, and gradually became an accepted means for "understanding" such problems.  Nonlinear dynamics ("dynamical systems") provided a useful understanding of the details of nonequilibrium flows.  It turned out that the phase-space distributions for these flows are typically "fractal" objects, with information dimensions strictly less than those at equilibrium.  This finding (which I came across while helping Bill Moran with his thesis work in the Department of Applied Science) is still percolating through the statistical physics "community" at a rate governed by the usual "one death at a time" rate of advances in understanding.  For this reason Harald Posch (University of Vienna, where we were able to attend his retirement celebration in the spring of 2007) and I have devoted a lot of time and effort toward spreading our understanding of how nonequilibrium systems work. 

My desire to spread the word is responsible for the books on the main page, including Computational Statistical Mechanics (1991) and Time Reversibility, Computer Simulation, and Chaos (1999,2001).  These two books, as well as my earlier one, Molecular Dynamics (1985), and my most recent one, Smooth Particle Applied Mechanics -- The State of the Art (2006), are all now available in Japanese translation.  Computational Statistical Mechanics was originally published by Elsevier at an unconscionable price (over $200, although it was prepared from camera-ready copy!) and has just recently become out of print.  Through the generosity of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the manuscript copy of this book is now available here in pdf form (23.5 megabytes).

Carol and I finished our last book, published by World Scientific (Singapore) as we were building our new house in Nevada. SPAM (Smooth Particle Applied Mechanics) is a method (discovered by Lucy and Monaghan in 1977) for solving the continuum equations with particle methods involving only ordinary (rather than partial) differential equations.  Because the method is specially transparent and easy to program and has great promise for problems involving material failure, I have devoted about a decade to research in that area.

We our enjoying our new home in Ruby Valley (Box 601 on the Ruby Valley Highway) very much, and the house across the highway (Box 598, The Ruby Valley Research Institute!), available as a guest house for visitors and with additional pasture for the horses. We are working on a newer purchase, 508 acres ten miles closer to Elko, our County Seat. As things progress they will appear on this website.  Any and all comments and suggestions are very welcome.  However, under no circumstances am I willing to use numbered equations.

Wm G Hoover, Winter/Spring 2010, Ruby Valley, Nevada

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