Engineering and technology

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

Atanasoff–Berry computer

The Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC) was the first automatic electronic digital computer, an early electronic digital computing device that has remained somewhat obscure. The ABC’s priority is debated among historians of computer technology, because it was neitherprogrammable, nor Turing-complete.

Conceived in 1937, the machine was built byIowa State College mathematics and physics professor John Vincent Atanasoff with the help of graduate student Clifford Berry. It was designed only to solve systems of linear equations and was successfully tested in 1942. However, its intermediate result storage mechanism, a paper card writer/reader, was not perfected, and when John Vincent Atanasoff left Iowa State College for World War II assignments, work on the machine was discontinued.[2] The ABC pioneered important elements of modern computing, including binary arithmetic and electronic switching elements, but its special-purpose nature and lack of a changeable, stored program distinguish it from modern computers. The computer was designated an IEEE Milestone in 1990.

Atanasoff and Berry’s computer work was not widely known until it was rediscovered in the 1960s, amidst conflicting claims about the first instance of an electronic computer. At that timeENIAC, that had been created by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, was considered to be the first computer in the modern sense, but in 1973 a U.S. District Court invalidated the ENIAC patent and concluded that the ENIAC inventors had derived the subject matter of the electronic digital computer from Atanasoff (see Patent dispute). When, in the mid-1970s, the secrecy surrounding the British World War II development of the Colossus computers that pre-dated ENIAC, was lifted and Colossus was described at a conference in Los Alamos, New Mexico in June 1976, John Mauchly and Konrad Zuse were reported to have been astonished.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff%E2%80%93Berry_computer

John Vincent Atanasoff

John Vincent Atanasoff (October 4, 1903 – June 15, 1995) was an American physicist and inventor, best known for being credited with inventing the first electronic digital computer.

John Vincent Atanasoff
John Atanasov.gif

Atanasoff, in the 1990s.

Born October 4, 1903
HamiltonNew York, U.S.
Died June 15, 1995 (aged 91)
Frederick, Maryland, U.S.
Citizenship American
Fields Physics
Doctoral advisor J. H. V. Vleck
Known for Atanasoff–Berry Computer
Notable awards Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius, First Class

Atanasoff invented the first electronic digital computer in the 1930s at Iowa State College. Challenges to his claim were resolved in 1973 when the Honeywell v. Sperry Rand lawsuit ruled that Atanasoff was the inventor of the computer.[1][2][3][4] His special-purpose machine has come to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff