17 Facts About Herman Goldstine

Herman Heine Goldstine was a mathematician and computer scientist, who worked as the director of the IAS machine at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study and helped to develop ENIAC, the first of the modern electronic digital computers.

Herman Goldstine subsequently worked for many years at IBM as an IBM Fellow, the company's most prestigious technical position.

Herman Heine Goldstine was born in Chicago in 1913 to Jewish parents.

Herman Goldstine attended the University of Chicago, where he joined the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity, and graduated with a degree in Mathematics in 1933, a master's degree in 1934, and a PhD in 1936.

In 1939 Goldstine began a teaching career at the University of Michigan, until the United States' entry into World War II, when he joined the US Army.

Herman Goldstine was commissioned a lieutenant and worked as an ordnance mathematician calculating firing tables at the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.

Mauchly wrote a proposal and in June 1943 he and Herman Goldstine secured funding from the Army for the project.

Von Neumann intended this to be a memo to the study group, but Herman Goldstine typed it up into a 101-page document that named von Neumann as the sole author.

On June 25,1946, Herman Goldstine forwarded 24 copies of the document to those intimately involved in the EDVAC project; dozens or perhaps hundreds of mimeographs of the report were forwarded to von Neumann's colleagues at universities in the United States and in Great Britain in the weeks that followed.

In Summer 1946, all of them were reunited to give presentations at the first computer course, which has come to be known as the Moore School Lectures; Herman Goldstine's presentations, given without notes, covered deeply and rigorously numerical mathematical methods useful in programs for digital computers.

Herman Goldstine was appointed as assistant director of the project and was later its director, after 1954.

Herman Goldstine went on to become the founding director of the Mathematical Sciences Department at IBM's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

Herman Goldstine wrote three books on the topic; The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, History of Numerical Analysis from the 16th Through the 19th Century and History of the Calculus of Variations from the Seventeenth Through the Nineteenth Century.

In retirement Herman Goldstine became executive director of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia between 1985 and 1997, in which capacity he was able to attract many prestigious visitors and speakers.

Herman Goldstine had a daughter and a son with Adele, who died in 1964.

Herman Goldstine died on June 16,2004, at his home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease.

Herman Goldstine's death was announced by the Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where a post-doctoral fellowship was renamed in his honor.