Heinz Billing
| Heinz Billing | |
|---|---|
Heinz Billing in 2012
|
|
| Born | 7 April 1914 Salzwedel, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany |
| Died | 4 January 2017 (aged 102) Garching bei München, Bavaria, Germany |
| Citizenship | Germany |
| Fields |
Physics Computer science Experimental Gravitation |
| Institutions | Aerodynamic Test Centre at Göttingen Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics Max Planck Institute for Physics |
| Alma mater | University of Göttingen |
| Doctoral advisor |
Walter Gerlach Eduard Rüchardt |
| Known for | Prototype laser interferometric gravitational wave detector Data storage device |
| Notable awards | Konrad Zuse Medal (1987) |
Heinz Billing (7 April 1914 – 4 January 2017) was a German physicist and computer scientist, widely considered a pioneer in the construction of computer systems and computer data storage, who built a prototype laser interferometric gravitational wave detector.
Billing was born in Salzwedel, in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. After studying mathematics and physics in University of Göttingen he received his doctorate in 1938 in Munich at the age of 24.
On 3 October 1943 he married Anneliese Oetker. Billing has three children: Heiner Erhard Billing (born November 18, 1944 in Salzwedel), Dorit Gerda Gronefeld Billing (born June 27, 1946 in Göttingen) and Arend Gerd Billing (born September 19, 1954 in Göttingen).
He turned 100 in April 2014 and died in January 2017 at the age of 102.
Billing worked at the Aerodynamic Research Institute in Göttingen, where he developed an magnetic drum memory.
According to Billing's memoirs, published by Genscher, Düsseldorf (1997), there was a meeting between Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse. It took place in Göttingen in 1947. The interrogation had the form of a colloquium. Participants were Womersley, Turing, Porter from England and a few German researchers like Zuse, Walther, and Billing. (For more details see Herbert Bruderer, Konrad Zuse und die Schweiz).
After a brief stay at the University of Sydney, Billing returned to join the Max Planck Institute for Physics in 1951. From 1952 through 1961 the group under Billing's direction constructed a series of four digital computers: the G1, G2, G1a, and G3.
He is the designer of the first German sequence-controlled electronic digital computer as well as of the first German stored-program electronic digital computer.
After transistors had been firmly established, when microelectronics arrived, after scientific computers were slowly overshadowed by commercial applications and computers were mass-produced in factories, Heinz Billing left the computer field in which he had been a pioneer for nearly 30 years.
...
Wikipedia