Marvin Stein (computer scientist)

Marvin Stein (1924-2015) was a mathematician and computer scientist, and the "father of computer science" at the University of Minnesota.

Marvin Stein was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1924 to Russian-Jewish immigrants. The family later moved to Los Angeles, California to treat Stein's mother's tuberculosis. As an adult Stein entered University of California, Los Angeles in 1941. His studies were interrupted and in 1942 he served in the US Army Signal Corps as a tabulating machine operator, and had a short stint working at IBM. He returned to school after the war and graduated from UCLA in 1947.

After earning his Ph.D. from the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA (an ancestor of UCLA's computer science department), Stein was hired as a senior research engineer by aircraft manufacturer Convair in southern California. He primarily worked on missile simulations for the SM-65 Atlas, on which he worked with a UNIVAC 1103. Though the 1103 been made for and used by the Armed Forces Security Agency under the name "Atlas 2" (unrelated to the missile of the same name), this was the first commercially sold 1103. Stein's work installing the UNIVAC 1103 with Erwin Tomash introduced him to the emerging computer-science scene in Minnesota in the 1950s.

Stein lost his job with Convair when his security clearance was revoked by the House Un-American Activities Committee on account of Stein's Jewish heritage. It was later re-instated, but Stein was moving on.

In 1955, Remington Rand, manufacturer of the UNIVAC computers, heard that the University of Minnesota was considering purchasing a machine from one of Rand's rivals: an IBM 650. Rand offered to simply give the university 400 free hours on a UNIVAC 1103 on the condition that they hire a dedicated faculty member to oversee its operations. Stein was hired in the IT Mathematics department in the University of Minnesota to fulfill this condition, and he assumed stewardship of the UNIVAC. The UNIVAC 1103 was around 60 feet long, 30 feet wide, and weighed over 17 tons.

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