14 Facts About Arthur Burks

Arthur Walter Burks 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.

Arthur Burks was for several decades a faculty member at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

When Mauchly and Eckert's proposed concept for an electronic digital computer was funded by the US Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory in June 1943, Arthur Burks was added to the design team.

Also during 1945 Arthur Burks assisted with the preliminary logical design of the EDVAC in meetings attended by Mauchly, Eckert, John von Neumann, and others.

On March 8,1946, Arthur Burks accepted an offer by von Neumann to join the computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and joined full-time the following summer.

Together, Goldstine and Arthur Burks gave nine of the Moore School Lectures in Summer 1946.

Arthur Burks helped found the university's computer science department, first as the Logic of Computers group in 1956, of which he was the director, then as a graduate program in 1957, and then as an undergraduate program within the new Department of Computer and Communication in 1967, which he chaired until 1971.

Arthur Burks declined a position heading up a different university's computing center, citing his primary interest as the purely theoretical aspects of computing machines.

Arthur Burks was awarded the Louis E Levi Medal in 1956.

Arthur Burks edited the final two volumes, published 1958, of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce and, over the years, wrote published articles on Peirce.

Arthur Burks ran the units through a car wash before restoring them and donating them to the University of Michigan.

In 1964 Burks was approached by attorney Sy Yuter and asked to join T Kite Sharpless and Robert F Shaw in litigation that would add their names as inventors to the ENIAC patent, which would allow them to profit from the sale of licenses to the premiere electronic digital computer apart from Sperry Rand, the company that owned the Eckert-Mauchly interest in the patent and was at that time seeking royalties from other computer manufacturers.

In 1990, Arthur Burks donated a portion of his papers to the university's Bentley Historical Library, where they are accessible to researchers.

Arthur Burks died May 14,2008, in an Ann Arbor, Michigan, nursing home from Alzheimer's disease.