Arthur Walter Burks papers

Arthur Walter Burks was born October 13, 1915 in Duluth, Minnesota. He earned his BA in mathematics and physics from DePauw University in 1936, and his PhD in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1941. He became an instructor at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering in the fall of that year and did war research on mine-sweeping, radar antennas, and the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). He left the Moore school after the ENIAC was dedicated and then worked at the Institute for Advanced Study with John von Neumann. There he joined with John von Neumann and Herman H. Goldstine to write one of the most influential reports in the field of computing, "Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument," which is mentioned in the biographies of many other pioneers. Burks joined the philosophy department at Michigan in 1946. In 1949 he founded a research group in the logic of computers, which operated until his retirement in 1986. This group did research on programming, automata theory, neural net simulation, computer modeling, self-reproducing and cellular systems. He now does research on adaptive computation. He co-founded a doctoral program in computer and communication sciences at Michigan in 1956, and when it became a department, he was its first chairman. He was named the Henry Russel Lecturer for 1977-1978, the highest honor his university can bestow on a faculty member. He was a visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur, India), Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (Beijing, People's Republic of China). Arthur Burks died May 14, 2008 at age 92 after a long progression of Alzheimers disease.