Howard Hathaway Aiken

Howard Hathaway Aiken (Aiken Howard Hathaway) (March 9, 1900, Houboken, pc. New Jersey - March 14, 1973, St. Louis, pc. Missouri), American mathematician, creator of one of the first electromechanical computers "Mark-1".

He graduated from the University of Madison (pc. Wisconsin).

In 1939 he defended his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University and for some time he taught there until he was called in naval gunfire. He was sent to one of the companies the firm IBM, where Aiken along with three other engineers, members of the firm, began work on the creation of automatic computing machines based on the description of Babbage's analytical machine.

The first such machine "Mark-1" (Mark I) was represented by Aiken and his colleagues in February 1944. The car was built on the electromechanical relays and operate decimal numbers coded on punched tape. She could perform any given sequence of the four arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), and refer to the previous result without human intervention. The car was 51 feet (15.3 meters) in length and 8 feet tall (2.4 meters). Weight was about 35 tons, the length of wire - more than 500 miles (800 km), the number of connections - more than 3 million. The machine is programmed by paper tape, and thus able to manage a person with minimal training. Car could handle numbers up to 23 digits.

"Mark I" was used Navy U.S. for the various tasks of a defensive nature - for artillery, ballistics, etc..

Continuing work in 1947, Aiken has created an advanced all-electric model - "Mark II".

Aiken has been awarded many medals the United States, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. He has published numerous articles on electronics.