Alice R Burks Author

Alice R. Burks is a research associate, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan. A professional writer, she graduated in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and worked there and at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds for U.S. Army Ordnance, computing firing tables for which the ENIAC was conceived and built as an automatic means of computing these tables. She is coauthor with Arthur W. Burks of “The ENIAC: The First General-Purpose Electronic Computer” (Annals of the History of Computing, 1981). Arthur W. Burks is Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, where he has also been the Russel lecturer. Early in his career he worked with John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine at the Institute lor Advanced Study, Princeton, in developing the logical design of an electronic digital computer. The basic design produced there became the prototype for many other computers built by universities, government research units, and International Business Machine Corporation. He is the author of Chance, Cause, Reason: An Inquiry into the Nature of Scientific Evidence (1977) among many other books and scientific articles. He and Alice Burks were at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the time the ENIAC computer was being developed.