Gerald Estrin

Gerald Estrin ( born September 9, 1921 in New York City; † March 29, 2012 in Los Angeles ) was an American computer scientist.

Estrin studied electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin with a bachelor's degree in 1948, her Master's degree in 1949 and his doctorate in 1951. Heard From 1950 to 1956 as an engineer for the group of John von Neumann, a series of early computer after von Neumann's plans at the Institute for Advanced Study developed (IAS computer). At the invitation of the Weizmann Institute, he built a similar computer in Israel as head of WEIZAC project (1954 /55). He was a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA), where until 1988 the computer science he presided from 1979 to 1982 and 1985 faculty. In 1991 he retired.

With works in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he is considered a pioneer of the Reconfigurable Computing ( reconfigurable computing with special hardware components, for example for image recognition, each of which was reprogrammed with their special structure were much faster than sequential computers), realized in the fixed plus variable Structure computer at UCLA. The idea was ahead of its time and was followed later with the advent of FPGAs on.

In 1996 he received the Computer Pioneer Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, Guggenheim Fellow and is Leitungsrat the Weizmann Institute.

His daughter Deborah Estrin is computer science professor. His daughter Judith Estrin is also a computer scientist and a businesswoman and manager of various software companies. His wife Thelma Estrin (* 1924) is also computer science professor at UCLA and focused on biomedical research, and expert systems.