Aiken, Howard H(athaway)

(born March 9, 1900, Hoboken, N.J., U.S.—died March 14, 1973, St. Louis, Mo.) U.S. mathematician and inventor. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. With three other engineers, he began work in 1939 on an automatic calculating machine that could perform any selected sequence of five arithmetical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and reference to previous results) without human intervention. The first such machine, the Harvard Mark I (1944), was 51 ft (15 m) long and 8 ft (2.4 m) high, and weighed 35 tons (31,500 kg).

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