Engineering and technology notes

Svalbard

Svalbard (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈsvɑːlbɑː, ˈsvɑl-];[3] formerly known by its Dutch name Spitsbergen) is a Norwegianarchipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Situated north of mainland Europe, it is about midway between continental Norway and the North Pole. The islands of the group range from 74° to 81° north latitude, and from 10° to 35° east longitude. The largest island is Spitsbergen, followed by Nordaustlandet and Edgeøya.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard

J. Presper Eckert

John Adam Presper “Pres” Eckert, Jr. (April 9, 1919 – June 3, 1995) was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly he designed the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC), presented the first course in computing topics (the Moore School Lectures), founded the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert’s invention of the mercury delay line memory.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Presper_Eckert

Klaus Fuchs

Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (29 December 1911 – 28 January 1988) was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who, in 1950, was convicted of supplying information from the American, British, and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after the Second World War. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons, and later, early models of the hydrogen bomb.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs

Edward Teller

Edward Teller (HungarianTeller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who was born in Hungary, and is known colloquially as “the father of the hydrogen bomb“, although he claimed he did not care for the title.[1] He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physicsspectroscopy (in particular the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi‘s theory of beta decay, in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the Jahn–Teller effect and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry.[2] Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, along with Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, and Augusta Teller, Teller co-authored a paper which is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics.[3]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller

John von Neumann

John von Neumann (/vɒn ˈnɔɪmən/; Hungarian: Neumann János Lajos, pronounced [ˈnɒjmɒn ˈjaːnoʃ ˈlɒjoʃ]; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, inventor, computer scientist, and polymath. He made major contributions to a number of fields, including mathematics (foundations of mathematics, functional analysis, ergodic theory, representation theory, operator algebras, geometry, topology, and numerical analysis), physics (quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics, and quantum statistical mechanics), economics (game theory), computing (Von Neumann architecture, linear programming, self-replicating machines, stochastic computing), and statistics.

Colossus computer

Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in 1943–1945 to help in thecryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to performBoolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded[2] as the world’s first programmable,electronicdigital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by astored program
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer