I had no idea that the “Goto” in “Goto BLAS” is actually the name of a person, Kazushige Goto, who has a short report about him in the New York Times. He apparently works single-handedly to hand-optimize his version of the BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) algorithm package that drives most mathematical and scientific software today:

Mr. Goto uses only a program called a software debugger that allows him to track how data moves among different components of a microprocessor.

He then reorganizes the individual software instructions so that his subroutines perform crucial algebraic functions more quickly to gain small amounts of processing speed from a specific type of computer chip.