Herman H. Goldstine

From left: Julian Bigelow , Herman Goldstine, Robert Oppenheimer and John von Neumann

Herman Heine Goldstine (born September 13, 1913 in Chicago , Illinois , † June 16, 2004 in Bryn Mawr ) was an American mathematician and computer scientist .

The son of German-Jewish immigrants studied mathematics at the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree in 1933, a master's degree in 1934 and a doctorate ( Conditions for minimum of a functional ) in 1936 under Lawrence Murray Graves (1896–1973). He briefly taught at the University of Michigan and then went on to serve as an officer in the US Army's ballistics department during World War II, where he made it to lieutenant colonel. It was here that he began to work with electronic calculating machines.

Goldstine became famous for introducing the flowchart for computer programs . From 1943 to 1946, together with J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania, he developed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), one of the world's first fully electronic computing systems. The computing power of the system was 0.2 ms for an addition and 2.8 ms for a simple multiplication .

After the war he worked with John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was a permanent member from 1946 and assisted von Neumann in his computer project. There they developed the EDVAC (1952), which already implemented the Von Neumann architecture . He then went to IBM , where he was a manager and from 1958 headed mathematical research. In 1965 he became director of research for data processing. From 1969 he worked as a scientific advisor at IBM and was an IBM Fellow .

Goldstine worked primarily in the field of numerical mathematics and also wrote a history of this subject. Goldstine's mathematical theorem is associated with his name. The American Philosophical Society awarded him in 1997 their Benjamin Franklin Medal . He was also a member of the American Philosophical Society (1979), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1983), and the National Academy of Sciences (1974).

From 1941 to 1964 he was married to Adele Katz , a former ENIAC programmer. His second marriage was to Ellen Watson Goldstine. From his first marriage he had a son and a daughter.

Fonts

• A History of Numerical Analysis from the 16th through the 19th Century , Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Vol. 2, Springer Verlag, 1977
• The computer from Pascal to von Neumann , Princeton University Press 1980
• Brief History of the Computer , in AMS History of Mathematics, Vol. 1, 1988 ( online )

Web links

• Literature by and about Herman H. Goldstine in the catalog of the German National Library
• Goldstine on the development of ENIAC
• Obituary in the New York Times

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project