Abc john vincent atanasoff biography

John Vincent Atanasoff was an American computer scientist (although the term did not yet exist when he did his most consequential work). He created the first digitalelectroniccomputing device, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer.

(Although it was never fully working, the purely electronic portion of it eventually worked fine; its main remaining problem was elsewhere.)

At the undergraduate level, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Florida; his graduate education started with a master's in mathematics at Iowa State College (as it was then).

For his doctorate in theoretical physics, he switched to the University of Wisconsin-Madison; his interest in creating a better computing device was developed during his doctoral work, where he had to do a great deal of work with a mechanical calculator.

He had been a teaching fellow back at Iowa State College in , and he became a professor in mathematics and physics there in the fall of , after getting hi