Biography:Arthur Burks
Arthur Burks | |
|---|---|
 Burks in 1971 | |
| Born | October 13, 1915 |
| Died | May 14, 2008 (aged 92) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan (Ph.D., M.A.) DePauw University (B.A.) |
| Scientific career | |
| Doctoral students | John Henry Holland |
Arthur Walter Burks (October 13, 1915 – May 14, 2008) was an American mathematician who worked in the 1940s as a senior engineer on the project that contributed to the design of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.[1] Decades later, Burks and his wife Alice Burks outlined their case for the subject matter of the ENIAC having been derived from John Vincent Atanasoff. Burks was also for several decades a faculty member at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Early life and education
The Moore School
The summer after obtaining his Ph.D., Burks moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and enrolled in the national defense electronics course offered by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering; his laboratory teaching assistant was J. Presper Eckert, a graduate student at the Moore School; a fellow student was John Mauchly, the chairman of the physics department at Ursinus College in nearby Collegeville, Pennsylvania. Both Burks and Mauchly sought and obtained teaching positions at the Moore School the following fall, and roomed together throughout the academic year.[2]
ENIAC
When Mauchly and Eckert's proposed concept for an electronic digital computer was funded by the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory in June 1943, Burks was added to the design team. Among his principal contributions to the project was the design of the high-speed multiplier unit. (Also during this time, Burks met and married Alice Rowe, a human computer employed at the Moore School.)
In April 1945, with John Grist Brainerd, Burks was charged with writing the technical reports on the ENIAC for publication. Also during 1945 Burks assisted with the preliminary logical design of the EDVAC in meetings attended by Mauchly, Eckert, John von Neumann, and others.
Burks also took a part-time position as a philosophy instructor at Swarthmore College during 1945–1946.
Institute for Advanced Study
University of Michigan
After working on this project, Burks relocated to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1946 to join the faculty of the University of Michigan, first as an assistant professor of philosophy, and as a full professor by 1954. With Irving Copi he sketched the necessary design for general purpose computing.[3]
Burks' doctoral students include John Holland, who in 1959 was the first student to receive a Ph.D. in computer science from Michigan, and possibly the first in the world.[4]
Burks served as president of the Charles S. Peirce Society in 1954–1955.[5] He edited the final two volumes (VII–VIII), published 1958, of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce and, over the years, wrote published articles on Peirce.
Restoration of parts of the ENIAC
Patent dispute
BACH Group
In the 1970s and 1980s Burks, working with his wife Alice, authored a number of articles on the ENIAC, and a book on the Atanasoff–Berry Computer.Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag[6][7]
Awards
- 2023: Stibitz-Wilson Award from the American Computer & Robotics Museum[8]
Works
- Burks, Arthur W., Goldstine, Herman H., and von Neumann, John (1946), Preliminary discussion of the logical design of an electronic computing instrument, 42 pages, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, June 1946, 2nd edition 1947. Eprint.
- Burks, Arthur W. and Wright, Jesse Bowdle (1952), Theory of Logical Nets. Amazon says: published by Burroughs Adding Machine Co.; Google Books says: published by University of Michigan Engineering Research Institute; 52 pages. Deep Blue Eprint.
- Burks, Arthur W. and Copi, Irving M. (1954), The logical design of an idealized general-purpose computer, Amazon says: published by Burroughs Corporation Research Center; Google Books says: published by University of Michigan Engineering Research Institute, 154 pages. Deep Blue Eprint.
- Burks, Arthur W. (1956), The logic of fixed and growing automata, Engineering Research Institute, University of Michigan, 34 pages.
- Burks, Arthur W. and Wang, Hao (1956), The logic of automata, Amazon says: published by Air Research and Development Command; Google Books says: published by University of Michigan Engineering Research Institute; 60 pages. Deep Blue Eprint.
- Peirce, Charles Sanders and Burks, Arthur W., ed. (1958), the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce Volumes 7 and 8, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, also Belknap Press (of Harvard University Press) edition, vols. 7-8 bound together, 798 pages, online via InteLex, reprinted in 1998 Thoemmes Continuum.
- Burks, Arthur W. (1971), Essays on Cellular Automata, University of Illinois Press, 375 pages.
- Burks, Arthur W. (1978), Review of The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, Carolyn Eisele, ed., in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 84, no. 5, September 1978, Project Euclid Eprint PDF 791KB.
- Burks, Arthur W. (1978). Chance, Cause and Reason: An Inquiry into the Nature of Scientific Evidence. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226080871. https://archive.org/details/chancecausereaso0000burk/page/n5.
- Burks, Arthur W. and Burks, Alice R. (1981), "The ENIAC: First General-Purpose Electronic Computer" in Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 3, no. 4, October 1981, pp. 310–399.
- Burks, Arthur W. (1986), Robots and free minds, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University of Michigan, 97 pages.
- {{cite book | last = Burks | first = Alice R. | authorlink = Alice Burks |author2=Arthur W. Burks
- Burks, Arthur W. (1996), "Peirce's evolutionary pragmatic idealism", Synthese, Volume 106, Number 3, 323–372.
A number of articles by Arthur W. Burks are listed on page 599 in index of Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce by Nathan Houser, Don D. Roberts, James Van Evraof, Google Book Search Beta page 599.
See also
References
- ↑ Weiss, Eric A. (2012) (in English). A Computer Science Reader. Springer New York. pp. 31. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=75nSBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA31&dq=Arthur+burks&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&ovdme=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiMipXbwpuQAxWoyzgGHV4TC_IQ6AF6BAgHEAM#v=onepage&q=Arthur%20burks&f=false.
- ↑ Avery, John Scales (2021) (in English). Information Theory And Evolution (Third Edition). World Scientific Publishing Company. pp. 236. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=1GtYEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA236&dq=Arthur+burks&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&ovdme=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjdo_TNw5uQAxUV2TgGHRkoIXE4FBDoAXoECAYQAw#v=onepage&q=Arthur%20burks&f=false.
- ↑ A.W. Burks & Irving Copi (1956) "The Logical Design of an Idealized General-Purpose Computer", Journal of the Franklin Institute 261: 299–314, and 421–36
- ↑ Booker, Lashon B. (August 2008), "An interview with John H. Holland", ACM SIGEVOlution 3 (3): 2–4, doi:10.1145/1562108.1562109.
- ↑ See "Presidents of the Charles S. Peirce Society" at the Charles S. Peirce Society Website. Eprint .
- ↑ Oppat, Susan (2008-05-17). "Arthur Burks, early computer pioneer, dead at 92". Ann Arbor News. http://blog.mlive.com/annarbornews/2008/05/arthur_burks_early_computer_pi.html.
- ↑ Steve Lohr (2008-05-19). "Arthur W. Burks, 92, Dies; Early Computer Theorist". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/technology/19burks.html?em&ex=1211342400&en=f386275d46948acf&ei=5087%0A.
- ↑ "Stibitz-Wilson Awards". https://acrmuseum.org/awards.
Further reading
- Salmon, Merrilee H., ed (1990). The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism: Essays in honor of Arthur W. Burks with his responses. Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic.
External links
- Oral history interview with Alice R. Burks and Arthur W. Burks. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
- Arthur Burks at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Error in Template:Internet Archive author: Arthur Burks doesn't exist.
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