John R. Pasta

John R. Pasta (born October 22, 1918 in New York City , † June 5, 1984 in Chicago ) was an American physicist and computer scientist .

Career

John R. Pasta grew up in New York City and initially worked as a broker and police officer. He then took up physics at City College of New York , but had to leave City College at the time of the Great Depression and take up other work. During the Second World War he served as a cryptography and radar expert in the US Army . After the war he was able to resume his studies at City College due to his military service under the GI Bill of Rights and received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from New York University. Pasta then worked on the MANIAC I computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory under Nicholas Metropolis in 1952 . In Los Alamos he was involved in the design of early computer systems for calculations in weaponry.

He then worked with Enrico Fermi and Stanisław Marcin Ulam on the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam experiment , the project through which he became famous and the results of which were widely discussed between physicists and researchers in the field of chaos theory . In 1956, at the invitation of John von Neumann , he went to the Atomic Energy Commission as a computer expert , where he built up the Mathematics and Computer department, which he headed for four years. In 1961 he accepted a position as a research professor at the Digital Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois , where he worked, among other things, on the mainframe computer ILLIAC 2 . In 1964 the laboratory was renamed the Faculty of Computer Science, which Pasta then headed until he left in 1970.

Publications

• E. Fermi, J. Pasta, S. Ulam: Studies of Nonlinear Problems, Document LA-1940 . Ed .: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory of the University of California. May 1955 (English, osti.gov [PDF]).

literature

• KK Curtis et al .: John R. Pasta, 1918-1984 , Annals of the History of Computing , Vol. 5, July 1983, pp. 224-238. doi : 10.1109 / MAHC.1983.10078
• Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing. (English, film; documentation from around 1972 about the ARPANET with a mention of John Pasta).