Arthur Burks
Arthur Walter Burks ( born October 13, 1915 in Duluth, Minnesota, † 14 May, 2008 Ann Arbor, Michigan ) was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He was involved in the 1940s in the development of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator ( ENIAC), the first all- electronic digital universal computer.
Life
Burks earned in 1936 his bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physics at the University of Greencastle and the Master (1937) and Ph.D. (1941 ) in philosophy from the University of Michigan. After finishing his studies in Michigan Burks moved to Philadelphia and enrolled at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Together with his fellow students John Presper Eckert, he designed a concept for an electronic digital computer, the ENIAC, which was funded in June 1943 by the U. S. Army. At Burks contribution was the design of the multiplier. In the same year he married Alice Rowe, who was employed at the Moore School.
1946 Burks was appointed by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Later he returned to Ann Arbor, where he was appointed to the University of Michigan for a professor of philosophy and co-founder of the department was computer technology. Burks was also 1954-1955 Chairman of the Charles S. Peirce Society -.
In the 1960s, he earned four modules of the original ENIAC, who had been standing around in a storage room and already rusted. He restored it and donated it to the University of Michigan, where they are still exhibited at the entrance of the building of the department of computer engineering.
Until the 1980s, Burks wrote with his wife several articles on the ENIAC as well as a book about the Atanasoff -Berry Computer. In 1990, he donated a portion of its documents to the University Archives.
Burks died in May 2008 in a nursing home of complications from Alzheimer's disease.
- Man
- Americans
- Inventor
- Developing a computer system
- Personality of Electrical Engineering
- Born in 1915
- Died in 2008