George Stibitz

George Robert Stibitz ( born April 20, 1904 in York, USA, † January 31, 1995 in Hanover (New Hampshire) ) is internationally recognized as one of the Fathers of the first modern digital computer. He worked as a researcher at Bell Labs, and was known for his work from the 1930s and 1940s over digital circuits for the representation of Boolean functions ( Boolean logic ) using electromechanical relays as switching elements.

Life

Stibitz was born in York (Pennsylvania), he earned his bachelor's degree from Denison University in Granville (Ohio ), his master's degree from Union College in 1927 and his Ph.D. in mathematical physics in 1930 at Cornell University.

Computer

In November 1937 completed George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs, a relay -based calculator, which he called the "K " model, because of the " kitchen table ", on which he had composed them. The machine could add binary numbers. The Bell Labs subsequently approved in late summer of 1938 a real research program Stibitz 's line. The resulting on January 8, 1940 completed Complex Number Calculator was able to perform calculations with complex numbers. As part of a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society at their conference at Dartmouth College on September 11, 1940 Stibitz used a teletype to send commands for the Complex Number Calculator in New York City over telephone lines. This was the first computer that was controlled remotely via a telephone line.

Stibitz held beyond those he registered for the Bell Labs, another 38 patents. Since 1964 he was a member of a research group at Dartmouth College and developed in this frame ideas in order to later use computer technology in medicine. From 1970 until his retirement in 1983 he was professor of physiology. Replicas of the K- model exist in the Smithsonian Institution and the William Howard Doane Library at Denison University.

Of particular interest is the Stibitz code, a representation for BCD numbers that facilitates the subtraction.

Honors

  • At the McNutt Hall Dartmouth College Hanover (NH, USA ) recalls a bronze plaque:

Computer Art

In his later years, Stibitz turned the " non-verbal uses of the computer " to. In particular, he used an Amiga to create computer art. In a letter he wrote in 1990 to the dean of mathematics and computer science at Denison University, he said:

I have devoted myself to the non-verbal computer applications and produced an exhibition of computer "art". The quotation marks are necessary here, because the result of my efforts, it is not to make important art, but to show that this employment is fun, just like the creation of the computer fifty years ago.

The department of mathematics and computer science at Denison University provides some of his works of art.

George Boole
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