Van Snyder spent 53 years as a mathematician and software engineer at the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, starting Bastille Day 1967. Before that, he’d earned a BS in Computer Science and an MS in Applied Mathematics and System Engineering. The first half of his career involved developing mathematical software components used in JPL, especially orbit determination, trajectory planning, instrument design, and data analysis. When the applied mathematics group was dissolved, he spent four years doing data analysis for the TOPEX and NSCAT satellites.

Then for twenty years, he developed mathematical models—and software to implement them—to do data analysis for the Microwave Limb Sounder on the NASA Earth Observing System Aura Satellite. Van retired on Halloween, 2020. He spent seventeen years as an adjunct associate professor of Computer Science.

He is a member of US and ISO committees to maintain the standard for the Fortran computer programming language, and a member of IFIP Working Group 2.5 on Numerical Software. Van has been interested in energy, and especially nuclear power, for decades, but that "education" only began in earnest twenty years ago when he found outstanding nuclear mentors (among them some founding advisors of SCGI).

Van published a book in March 2024 entitled Where Will We Get Our Energy? It's a comprehensive end-to-end life-cycle system-engineering analysis of the entire energy landscape. Everything is quantified, with no vague hand waving, containing some 350 bibliographic citations. 

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