John Vincent Atanasoff
John Vincent Atanasoff, , (October 4, 1903 – June 15, 1995) was an American physicist and inventor credited with inventing the first electronic digital computer. Atanasoff invented the first electronic digital computer in the 1930s at Iowa State College (now known as Iowa State University). Challenges to his claim were resolved in 1973 when the Honeywell v. Sperry Rand lawsuit ruled that Atanasoff was the inventor of the computer. His special-purpose machine has come to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer. Early life and education Atanasoff was born on October 4, 1903, in Hamilton, New York to an electrical engineer and a school teacher. Atanasoff's father, Ivan Atanasov, was of Bulgarian origin, born in 1876 in the village of Boyadzhik, close to Yambol, then in the Ottoman Empire. While Ivan Atanasov was still an infant, his own father was killed by Ottoman soldiers after the Bulgarian April Uprising. In 1889, Ivan immigrated to the United States with his uncle. John's father later became an electrical engineer, whereas his mother, Iva Lucena Purdy (of mixed French and Irish ancestry), was a teacher of mathematics. Atanasoff was raised in Brewster, Florida. Young Atanasoff's ambitions and intellectual pursuits were in part influenced by his parents, whose interests in the natural and applied sciences cultivated in him a sense of critical curiosity and confidence. At the age of nine, he learned to use a slide rule, followed shortly by the study of logarithms, and subsequently completed high school at Mulberry High School in two years. In 1925, Atanasoff received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida. He continued his education at Iowa State College and in 1926 earned a master's degree in mathematics. He completed his formal education in 1930 by earning a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with his thesis, The Dielectric Constant of Helium. Upon completion of his doctorate, Atanasoff accepted an assistant professorship at Iowa State College in mathematics and physics. Computer development Partly due to the drudgery of using the mechanical Monroe calculator, which was the best tool available to him while he was writing his doctoral thesis, Atanasoff began to search for faster methods of computation. At Iowa State, Atanasoff researched the use of slaved Monroe calculators and IBM tabulators for scientific problems, with which controlled the Monroe using the output of an IBM. In 1936 he invented an analog calculator for analyzing surface geometry. At this point, he was pushing the boundaries of what gears could do and the fine mechanical tolerance required for good accuracy pushed him to consider digital solutions. With a grant of $650 received in September 1939 and the assistance of his graduate student Clifford Berry, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) was prototyped by November of that year. According to Atanasoff, several operative principles of the ABC were conceived by him during the winter of 1938 after a drive to Rock Island, Illinois. The key ideas employed in the ABC included binary math and Boolean logic