Bert Woodard Rust was raised on a farm in the last years of the Old South. From 1958 to 1968 he worked in the Computing Technology Center at the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant while attending the University of Tennessee where he received a B.S. in Engineering Physics and an M.S. in Mathematics. In 1963 he married Marilyn A. Miller who bore him four sons in the years 1967-1975. From 1968 to 1971 he worked for Tennecomp Systems, Inc. while attending the University of Illinois where he received a Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1974. From 1972 to 1980 he was employed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he worked on enviromental and ecological modelling problems. Since 1980 he has worked as a mathematician for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (formerly the National Bureau of Standards). His research interests include ill-posed problems, time-series modelling, nonlinear regression, and observational cosmology. From 1989 to 2000, he was an adjoint professor for the Johns Hopkins University Part-Time Programs in Engineering and Applied Science where he taught graduate courses in numerical analysis and digital spectral analysis.