Biography:Calvin Mooers
Calvin Northrup Mooers | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 24, 1919 Minneapolis, Minnesota |
| Died | December 1, 1994 (aged 75) Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Computer Scientist |
| Spouse(s) | Charlotte Davis |
Calvin Northrup Mooers (October 24, 1919 – December 1, 1994), was an American computer scientist known for his work in information retrieval and for the programming language TRAC.
Early life
Mooers was a native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, attended the University of Minnesota, and received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1941. He worked at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory from 1941 to 1946, and then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a master's degree in mathematics and physics. At M.I.T. he developed a mechanical system using superimposed codes of descriptors for information retrieval called Zatocoding. He founded the Zator Company in 1947 to market this idea, and pursued work in information theory, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence.
He coined the term "information retrieval", using it first in a conference paper presented in March 1950.[1] See also a short paper published later that year from Mooers.[2]
Mooers's law
He coined "Mooers's law" (not to be confused with Moore's law) and its corollary in 1959:
- An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.
- Where an information retrieval system tends not to be used, a more capable information retrieval system may tend to be used even less.
TRAC
He founded the Rockford Research Institute in 1961, where he developed the TRAC programming language, and attempted to control its distribution and development using trademark law and a unique invocation of copyright.[3] (At the time patent law would not allow him to control what he saw as his intellectual property and profit from it.) The trademark strategy was later used by Ada.
Awards
Mooers received the American Society for Information Science's Award of Merit in 1978. The citation reads in part:
Death
Mooers died in 1994 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mooers's article critical of John Vincent Atanasoff and his brief tenure as chief of a failed computer construction project at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory during World War II, was published posthumously in the May–June 2001 issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
References
- ↑ Mooers, C. (March 1950). "The theory of digital handling of non-numerical information and its implications to machine economics". Proceedings of the Meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery at Rutgers University.
- ↑ Mooers, C. (1950). "Information retrieval viewed as temporal signaling". Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians 1: 572–573. http://www.mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1950.1/Main/icm1950.1.0565.0576.ocr.pdf#page=8. Retrieved 2011-12-05.
- ↑ "History of the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. - the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S.". http://www.resistors.org/index.php/History_of_the_R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S..
Sources
- Mooers, Calvin N. (April 2001). "The Computer Project at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory" (PDF). IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (IEEE) 23 (2): 51–67. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2001.10002. ISSN 1058-6180. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MAHC.2001.10002.
- Garfield, Eugene (1997-03-17). "A Tribute to Calvin N. Mooers, a Pioneer of Information Retrieval". The Scientist 11 (6): 9. http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/commentaries/tsv11(06)p09y19970317.pdf.
- Corbitt, Kevin D. (1995). "Calvin Mooers (1919-1994) Obituary". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 17 (3): 79–81. doi:10.1109/mahc.1995.397066. https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/an/1995/03/00397065.pdf.
External links
- Calvin N. Mooers Papers, 1930–1992 at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
- Oral history interview with Calvin N. Mooers and Charlotte D. Mooers at the Charles Babbage Institute. Interview discusses information retrieval and programming language research from World War II through the early 1990s.
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