Wallace John Eckert
| Wallace John Eckert | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 19, 1902 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
| Died | August 24, 1971 (aged 69) |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Astronomy |
| Institutions |
Columbia University United States Naval Observatory |
| Doctoral advisor | Ernest William Brown |
| Known for | Scientific computing |
| Influences | Ernest William Brown |
| Influenced |
Herb Grosch Llewellyn Thomas |
| Notable awards | James Craig Watson Medal (1966) |
Wallace John Eckert (June 19, 1902 – August 24, 1971) was an American astronomer, who directed the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau at Columbia University which evolved into the research division of IBM.
Wallace John Eckert was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on January 19, 1902. Shortly thereafter, his parents John and Anna Margaret (née Heil) Eckert moved to Erie County, PA where they raised their four sons on a farm in Albion, PA. Wallace graduated from Albion High School in a class of six boys and eight girls. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1925, and earned an MA from Amherst College in 1926.
He started teaching at Columbia University in 1926, and earned his PhD from Yale in 1931 in astronomy under Professor Ernest William Brown (1866–1938).
He married Dorothy Woodworth Applegate in 1932. They raised three children, Alice, John and Penelope.
He was not related to another computer pioneer of the time, J. Presper Eckert (1919–1995).
Around 1933 Eckert proposed interconnecting punched card tabulating machines from IBM located in Columbia's Rutherford Laboratory to perform more than simple statistical calculations. Eckert arranged with IBM president Thomas J. Watson for a donation of newly developed IBM 601 calculating punch, which could multiply instead of just adding and subtracting. In 1937 the facility was named the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau. IBM support included customer service and hardware circuit modifications needed to tabulate numbers, create mathematical tables, add, subtract, multiply, reproduce, verify, create tables of differences, create tables of logarithms and perform Lagrangian interpolation, all to solve differential equations for astronomical applications. In January 1940, Eckert published Punched Card Methods in Scientific Computation, which solved the problem of predicting the orbits of the planets, using the IBM electric tabulating machines, based on the punched card. This slim book is only 136 pages, including the index.
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