John Mauchly grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In 1927 he got a scholarship to the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied engineering but soon switched to physics, earning his first degree. In 1932 he earned a doctorate and taught physics at various colleges. Mauchly, who had been a physics…
J Presper Eckert Jr. attended the William Penn Carter School in Germanstown. In 1937, after graduating from school, he entered the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania from where he graduated in 1941. After graduation he was offered a teaching job at Moore, where he met…
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…
Grace Brewster Murray graduated from Vassar with a B.A. in mathematics in 1928 and worked under algebraist Oystein Ore at Yale for her M.A. (1930) and Ph.D. (1934). She married Vincent Foster Hopper, an educator, in 1930 and began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931. She had achieved the rank…
Born in 1900, Howard Aiken was an influential pioneer in the world of computing. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, he earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1939. While a graduate student he began plans to create a large computer. His first efforts working with IBM produced the ASCC…
John Atanasoff, a professor of mathematics and physics at Iowa State College, built an electronic binary computer that represents the first applications of electronics to automatic calculation. Despite never being fully operational, his ideas were major contributions to modern electronic computers. He was long familiar with the problems of solving…
Born June 22, 1910, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, German scientist Konrad Zuse built the first of two electromechanical computers, the Z1 and Z2. A civil engineering student in 1934, he quickly saw the potential value of a machine that solved tedious algebra in minutes. He built them using binary, setting the use of…
Born June 23rd, 1912 in London, England, Turing displayed a penchant for math at an early age. He attended Kings College, Cambridge, and Princeton, where he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics. He published “On Computable Numbers” in 1936, which established the theoretical foundations of digital, stored-program computing. During WWII he…