Howard A. Aiken
John Vincent Atanasoff
Charles Babbage
Clifford Berry
George Boole 
Charles -Xavier Thomas de Colmar
Prosper Eckert
Galilei
Herman H. Goldstine
Herman Hollerith
José Maria Jacquard
Kepler
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
 Condessa
de Lovelace
Amadeu Mannheim
John W. Muchly
Napier
John von Neumann
William Schickard
George Stibitz
Alan Turing
Konrad Zuze |
| Galileu Galilei (1564-1642), físico
e astronomo italianao. Foi un dos fundadores do método esperimental.
Foi professor de matemática em Pisa e Pádua. Como a
matemática na universidade no século XVI compreendia Física
e Astronomia e em seus estudos de astronomia, necessitava realizar
complexos cálculos matemáticos, Galileu combinou as
ciências Matemática e Física.
John Napier (1550-1617), barão de Merchiston,
Escócia, , interessava-se por teologia, finanças e
matemática. Por achar que as operações matemáticas
de multiplicação, divisão, raizes quadrada e
cúbica com números além de tediosas eram passsíveis
de erros, dedicou-se a descobrir uma forma de simplificá-las e acabou
inventando os logarítmos.
William Oughtred (
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), matemático, físico,
filósofo e escritor francês. Responsável por
diversas descobertas científicas, tais como as leis da pressão
atmosférica e do equilíbrio dos líqüidos, o triangulo
aritmético, o cálculo das probabilidades a prensa hidráulica
e a teoria da ciclóide. Aos 18 anos, inventou a máquina
de calcular conhecida como Pascaline, para aliviar o trabalho que seu pai,
coletor de impostos, tinha em realizar cálculos cansativos.
Alan Turing , matemático graduado
pela Universidade de Cambridgeem 1934. Escreveu muitos trabalhos
sobre filosofia, psicologia, química, física e biologia.
Escreveu um trabalho apresentado como a "Máquina de Turing".
Obteve o título de doutor em Princeton. Em setembro de 1934, ao
eclodir a II Guerra Mundial, foi para a Escola de cifra e Código
do Governo como criptoanalista em Bletchley Park. Teve uma importância
muito grande ao decifrar os códigos alemães, projetou
a "Bomba" .
Participou com Newmann, em Manchester, da criação
do MARK I da UNniversidade de Manchester, considerado pelos europeus como
o primeiro computador (para um fim específico).
Em 1950, publicou um importante trabalho "Computing Machinery
and Intelligence", que antecipa preocupações com a
Inteligência Artificial. |
John W. Mauchly, nasceu em 1907 e
faleceu em 1980. Trabalhou na Moore School of Electrical Engineering de
1941 a 1946
Mauchly (1907-1980), who worked
at the Moore School of Electrical
Engineering between 1941 and
1946. In focusing on Mauchly, we
do not claim that he was the
principal or sole inventor of this
machine. At the very least, this
credit would have to be shared with
J. Presper Eckert (1919-1995),
who at the time of the ENIAC's
inception in 1942 had barely
completed his Master's degree. If
Mauchly had initially conceived of
ENIAC's architecture, it was Eckert
who possessed the engineering
skills to bring the idea to life. We
chose in this exhibit to focus on the
career of John Mauchly, partly to
reveal the historical complexities
of the process of invention that can
only be seen through close attention
to a single individual. More
pragmatically, we chose John
Mauchly in order to introduce
scholars to the John Mauchly
Papers, held by the Department of
Special Collections, Van Pelt
Library, University of
Pennsylvania.
http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/mauchly/jwmintro.html |
J. Presper Eckert nasceu em 9 de abril de
1919 e faleceu em 1995.
Cursou a Universidade de Pensilvania, onde se formou (1941) e
defendeu seu mestrado ( 1943) em engenharia elétrica. Em 1964, recebeu
seu título de doutor jonorário pela mesma universidade.
Foi engenheiro chefe do projeto ENIAC em The Moore School
of the University of Pennsylvania de 1944 a 1946.
Em 1946, tornou-se vice-presidente da Eckert-Mauchly Computer
Corporation. Em 1955, foi indicado para a vice-presidência
da Remington Rand Division da Sperry Rand Corporation, para o período
de 1955 a 1962. Continuou na mesma posição quando a
empresa se tornou UNIVAC e mais tarde UNISYS.
Referência: http://www.si.edu/resource/tours/comphist/eckert.htm |
John Louis von Neumann nasceu em 28 de dezembro de 1903 em Budapest
na Hungria e morrei em 8 de fevereiro de 1957 em Washington, nos Estados
Unidos.
Brilliant
mathematician, synthesizer, and promoter of the stored program concept,
whose logical design of the IAS became the prototype of most of its
successors -
the von Neumann Architecture.
Referência: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html
Educ: University of Budapest, 1921; University of
Berlin, 1921-23; Chemical Engineering,
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule [ETH]
(Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), 1923-25;
Doctorate, Mathematics (with minors in experimental
physics and chemistry), University of Budapest,
1926; Prof. Exp: Privatdozent, University of Berlin,
1927-30; Visiting Professor, Princeton
University, 1930-53; Professor of Mathematics, Institute
for Advanced Study, Princeton University,
1933-57; Honors and Awards: D.Sc. (Hon), Princeton
University, 1947; Medal for Merit
(Presidential Award), 1947; Distinguished Civilian
Service Award, 1947; D.Sc. (Hon), University of
Pennsylvania, 1950; D.Sc. (Hon), Harvard University,
1950; D.Sc. (Hon), University of Istanbul,
1952; D.Sc. (Hon), Case Institute of Technology,
1952; D.Sc. (Hon), University of Maryland, 1952;
D.Sc. (Hon), Institute of Polytechnics, Munich,
1953; Medal of Freedom (Presidential Award),
1956; Albert Einstein Commemorative Award, 1956;
Enrico Fermi Award, 1956; Member,
American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Member, Academiz
Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Lima,
Peru; Member, Acamedia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome,
Italy; Member, National Academy of
Sciences; Member, Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences
and Letters, Amsterdam, Netherlands;
Member, Information Processing Hall of Fame, Infomart,
Dallas TX, 1985.
Von Neumann was a child prodigy, born into a banking family is Budapest,
Hungary. When only six years old he could divide eight-digit numbers
in his head.
He received his early education in Budapest, under the tutelage of
M. Fekete, with
whom he published his first paper at the age of 18. Entering the University
of
Budapest in 1921, he studied Chemistry, moving his base of studies
to both Berlin
and Zurich before receiving his diploma in 1925 in Chemical Engineering.
He
returned to his first love of mathematics in completing his doctoral
degree in
1928. he quickly gained a reputation in set theory, algebra, and quantum
mechanics. At a time of political unrest in central Europe, he was
invited to visit
Princeton University in 1930, and when the Institute for Advanced Studies
was
founded there in 1933, he was appointed to be one of the original six
Professors
of Mathematics, a position which he retained for the remainder of his
life. At the
instigation and sponsorship of Oskar Morganstern, von Neumann and Kurt
Gödel
became US citizens in time for their clearance for wartime work. There
is an
anecdote which tells of Morganstern driving them to their immigration
interview,
after having learned about the US Constitution and the history of the
country. On
the drive there Morganstern asked them if they had any questions which
he could
answer. Gödel replied that he had no questions but he had found
some logical
inconsistencies in the Constitution that he wanted to ask the Immigration
officers
about. Morganstern strongly recommended that he not ask questions,
just answer
them!
During 1936 through 1938 Alan Turing was a graduate student in the Department
of Mathematics at Princeton and did his dissertation under Alonzo Church.
Von
Neumann invited Turing to stay on at the Institute as his assistant
but he preferred
to return to Cambridge; a year later Turing was involved in war work
at Bletchley
Park. This visit occurred shortly after Turing's publication of his
1934 paper "On
Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem"
which
involved the concepts of logical design and the universal machine.
It must be
concluded that von Neumann knew of Turing's ideas, though whether he
applied
them to the design of the IAS Machine ten years later is questionable.
[5]
Von Neumann's interest in computers differed from that of his peers
by his quickly
perceiving the application of computers to applied mathematics for
specific
problems, rather than their mere application to the development of
tables. During
the war, von Neumann's expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology,
game theory, and statistics, was put to good use in several projects.
This work led
him to consider the use of mechanical devices for computation, and
although the
stories about von Neumann imply that his first computer encounter was
with the
ENIAC, in fact it was with Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I (ASCC) calculator.
His correspondence in 1944 shows his interest with the work of not
only Aiken
but also the electromechanical relay computers of George Stibitz, and
the work by
Jan Schilt at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia
University.
By the latter years of World War II von Neumann was playing the part
of an
executive management consultant, serving on several national committees,
applying his amazing ability to rapidly see through problems to their
solutions.
Through this means he was also a conduit between groups of scientists
who were
otherwise shielded from each other by the requirements of secrecy.
He brought
together the needs of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (and the Manhattan
Project) with the capabilities of firstly the engineers at the Moore
School of
Electrical Engineering who were building the ENIAC, and later his own
work on
building the IAS machine. Several "supercomputers" were built by National
Laboratories as copies of his machine.
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