Ed Fredkin
| Dr. Edward Fredkin | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1934 Los Angeles |
| Residence | Brookline, MA |
| Citizenship | USA |
| Nationality | USA |
| Fields | Computer Science, Physics, Business |
| Institutions |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Capital Technologies, Inc. |
| Alma mater | California Institute of Technology (Caltech) |
| Known for | Fredkin gate, Trie data structure |
| Notable awards | Dickson Prize in Science 1984 |
Dr. Edward Fredkin (born 1934) is a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pennsylvania, and an early pioneer of Digital physics.
Fredkin's primary contributions include his work on reversible computing and cellular automata. While Konrad Zuse's book, Calculating Space (1969), mentioned the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin gate represented the essential breakthrough. In recent work, he uses the term Digital philosophy (DP).
During his career, Fredkin served on the faculties of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Computer Science, was a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech, and was Research Professor of Physics at Boston University, Massachusetts.
At age 19, Fredkin left California Institute of Technology (Caltech) college after a year to join the United States Air Force (USAF) to become a fighter pilot.
Fredkin has worked with a number of companies in the computer field and has held academic positions at a number of universities. He is a computer programmer, a pilot, an advisor to businesses and governments, and a physicist. His main interests concern digital computer-like models of basic processes in physics.
Fredkin's field was physics; however, he became involved with computers in 1956 when he was sent by the Air Force, where he had trained as a jet pilot, to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. On completing his service, in 1958, Fredkin was hired by J. C. R. Licklider to work at the research firm, Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN). After seeing the PDP-1 prototype at the Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, in December 1959, Fredkin recommended that BBN purchase the very first PDP-1 to support research projects at BBN. The PDP-1 came with no software whatsoever.
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