Calvin Mooers

Calvin Northrup Mooers (born October 24, 1919 in Minneapolis , Minnesota , † December 1, 1994 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) ) was an American pioneer of computer science . He is the founder of information retrieval and developed one of the first programming languages with TRAC .

Mooers studied mathematics at the University of Minnesota until 1941 . From 1941 to 1946 he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At the end of the 1940s he coined the terms descriptor and information retrieval .

He founded the Rockford Research Institute , where he invented the new programming language TRAC in 1961.

In 1978 he was awarded the Award of Merit by the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) for his work .

Mooer's Law

In 1959 he formulated was named after him Mooers Act (Engl. Mooers' Law , not to be confused with the Moore's Law ):

"An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it."

"An information retrieval system tends not to be used if it is more inconvenient and tedious for its user to have information than not to have it."

The statement becomes clearer in a paper Mooers published that same year:

"It is now my suggestion that many people may not want information, and that they will avoid using a system precisely because it gives them information."

"I now suspect that a lot of people do not want any information and prefer not to use a system, precisely because it informs them."

Web links

• Biography and Bibliography from the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota

• Calvin Mooers in the database of Find a Grave (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Calvin Mooers , US Social Security Death Directory (SSDI), accessed October 4, 2018
2. ↑ Brice Austin: Mooers' Law: In and out of Context Archived from the original on May 20, 2007. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology . 25, No. 8, June 2001, pp. 607-609. Retrieved May 23, 2007.