Herman Goldstine

Herman Heine Goldstine (September 13, 1913 – June 16, 2004), mathematician, computer scientist and scientific administrator, was a one of the original developers of ENIAC, the first of the modern electronic digital computers.

Personal life

Herman Heine Goldstine was born in Chicago in 1913. He attended the University of Chicago, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a degree Mathematics in 1933, a master's degree in 1934 and a PhD. in 1936. For three years he was a research assistant under Gilbert Ames Bliss, an authority on the mathematical theory of exterior ballistics. In 1939 Goldstine began a teaching career at the University of Michigan, until the United States' entry into World War II when he joined the Army. In 1941 he married Adele Katz who was an ENIAC programmer and wrote the technical description for ENIAC. He had a daughter and a son with Adele who died in 1964. Two years later he married Ellen Watson.

In retirement Goldstine became executive director of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia between 1985 and 1997 where he was able to attract many prestigious visitors and speakers.

Goldstine died on June 16, 2004 at his home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease. His death was announced by the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York where a post-doctoral fellowship was renamed in his honor.

BRL and the Moore School

As a result of the United States' entering World War II, Goldstine left the University of Michigan where he was a professor in July, 1942 to enlist in the Army. He was commissioned a lieutenant and worked as an ordnance mathematician calculating firing tables at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. The firing tables were used in battle to find the appropriate elevation and azimuth for aiming artillery, which had a range of several miles.

The firing table calculations were accomplished by about one hundred women operating mechanical desk calculators. Each combination of gun, round and geographical region required a unique set of firing tables. It took about 750 calculations to compute a single trajectory and each table had about 3,000 trajectories. It took one of these people—known, ironically, as "computers"—about 12 days to compute one trajectory, and more than four years to compute a table. To increase production, BRL enlisted the computing facilities of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Goldstine was the liaison between BRL and the university.

The ENIAC

While making some adjustments to the Moore School's differential analyzer, engineer Joseph Chapline suggested Goldstine visit John Mauchly, a physics instructor at the Moore School, who had distributed a memorandum proposing that the calculations could be done thousands of times faster with an electronic computer using vacuum tubes. Mauchly wrote a proposal and in June 1943 he and Goldstine secured funding from the Army for the project. The ENIAC was built in 30 months with 200,000 man hours. The ENIAC was huge, measuring 30 by 60 feet and weighing 30 tons with 18,000 vacuum tubes. The device could only store 20 numbers and took days to program. It was completed in late 1945 as World War II was coming to an end.

The EDVAC

In spite of disappointment that ENIAC had not contributed to the war effort, interest remained strong in the Army to develop an electronic computer. Prior even to the ENIAC's completion, the Army procured a second contract from the Moore School to build a successor machine known as the EDVAC. Goldstine, Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert and Arthur Burks began to study the development of the new machine in the hopes of correcting the deficiencies of the ENIAC.

Meeting von Neumann

In the summer of 1944 Goldstine had a chance encounter with the prominent mathematician John von Neumann on a railway platform in Aberdeen, Maryland where Goldstine described his project at University of Pennsylvania. Unknown to Goldstine, von Neumann was working on the top secret Manhattan Project that was building the first atomic bomb. The calculations needed for this project were also daunting.

The "First Draft"

As a result of the conversations with Goldstine, von Neumann joined the study group and wrote a memo called "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC". Von Neumann intended this to be a memo to the study group, but Goldstine typed it up into a 101 page document that listed von Neumann as the sole author. On June 25, 1946, Goldstine forwarded 24 copies of the document to those intimitely involved in the EDVAC project; dozens or perhaps hundreds of mimeographs of the report were forwarded to von Neumann's colleagues at universities in the U.S. and in England in the weeks that followed. While incomplete, the paper was very well received and became a blueprint for building electronic digital computers. Due to von Neuman's prominence as a major American mathematician the EDVAC architecture became known as the von Neumann architecture.

One of the key ideas was that the computer would store a program in its electronic memory rather than programming the computer using mechanical switches and patch cables. This, and other ideas in the paper had been discussed in the EDVAC study group before Von Neumann joined the group. The fact that other members of the group were not listed as authors created resentment that led to the group's dissolution at the end of the war.

Eckert and Mauchly went on to form the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, a company that in part survives today as the Unisys Corporation, while von Neumann, Goldstine and Burks went on to academic life at the Institute for Advanced Study. In Summer 1946, all of them reunited to give presentations at the first computer course, which has come to be known as the Moore School Lectures; Goldstine's presentations, given without notes, covered deeply and rigorously numerical mathematical methods useful in programs for digital computers.

Institute for Advanced Study

After World War II Goldstine joined von Neumann and Burks at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University where they built a computer referred to as the IAS machine. Goldstine was appointed assistant director of the project and director after 1954.

The IAS machine influenced the design of IBMs early computers, through von Neumann who was a consultant to IBM. When von Neumann died in 1958, the IAS computer project terminated. Goldstine went on to become the founding director of the Mathematical Sciences Department at IBM's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

IBM

At IBM one of Goldstine's most significant roles was in fostering relations between IBM researchers and the academic community. In 1969 he was appointed an IBM Fellow, the company's most prestigious technical honor, and a consultant to the director of research. As a fellow Goldstine developed an interest in the history of computing and mathematical sciences. He wrote three books on the topic; "The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann", "History of Numerical Analysis from the 16th Through the 19th Century" and "History of the Calculus of Variations from the Seventeenth Through the Nineteenth Century". As the title implies, in "The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann", Goldstine leaves little doubt that in his opinion von Neumann played a critical role in developing modern theories of computing.

Awards and honoraria

* Harry H. Goode Memorial Award in 1979
* National Medal of Science (1983)
* Hall of Fame of the Army Ordnance Department (1997)
* IEEE Pioneer Award
* member of the National Academy of Science
* member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
* member of the American Philosophical Society

Publications

* Arthur W. (Arthur Walter) Burks, Herman Heine Goldstine, John Von Neumann; "Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computer Instrument"; (Institute for Advanced Study, January 1, 1946) ASIN B0007HW8WE
* cite book
first = Herman H.
last = Goldstine
coauthors = Goldstine, A.
chapter = The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC)
origyear = 1946
title = The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers
publisher = Springer-Verlag
location = New York
year = 1982
pages = 359-373
id = ISBN 3-540-11319-3
* cite book
first = Herman H.
last = Goldstine
url = http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/597.html
title = The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann
location = Princeton, NJ
publisher = Princeton University Press
date = 1980-10-01
id = ISBN 0-691-02367-0
* cite book
first = Herman H.
last = Goldstine
title = New and Full Moons: 1001 B.C. to A.D. 1651
location = Philadelphia
publisher = American Philosophical Society
year = 1973
id = ISBN 0-87169-094-2
* cite book
first = Herman H.
last = Goldstine
title = History of Numerical Analysis from the 16th Through the 19th Century (Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, 2)
publisher = Springer-Verlag
location = New York
year = 1977
id = ISBN 0-387-90277-5
* cite book
first = Herman H.
last = Goldstine
title = History of the Calculus of Variations from the Seventeenth Through the Nineteenth Century (Studies in the History of Mathematics and the Physical Sciences)
publisher = Springer-Verlag
location = New York
month = October
year = 1980
id = ISBN 0-387-90521-9
* cite book
first = Jakob
last = Bernoulli
coauthors = Bernoulli, Jean; Goldstine, Herman H.; P Radelet-de Grave
title = Die Streitschritfen Von Jacob Und Johann Bernoulli: Variationsrechnung
location = Basel; Boston
publisher = Birkhäuser
month = September
year = 1991
id = ISBN 3-7643-2348-5, ISBN 0-8176-2348-5

References and external links

* [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/26/business/26goldstineobit.html Herman Goldstine, Who Helped Build First Computers, Dies at 90] (Wolfgang Saxon, "New York Times", 26 June 2004)
* [http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/display.phtml?id=275 Two oral history interviews with Herman H. Goldstine] . Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota - Goldstine discusses his experiences with the ENIAC electronic calculator at the University of Pennsylvania and the construction of firing tables during World War II. He mentions the EDVAC, the ENIAC's successor, and its innovation of stored programming, for which he credits John von Neumann. In the second interview, Goldstine recounts his work with von Neumann on the Institute for Advanced Study computer in the late 1940s and the funding by AEC officials, patent problems, as well as the many visitors to the project and the many computers (Whirlwind, ILLIAC, JOHNNIAC, IBM 70l) modeled after the IAS computer.
* [http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/goldstine_obit.htm Herman Goldstine obituary]
* [http://www.aps-pub.com/proceedings/1502/1500212.pdf Biographical memoir for American Philosophical Society]
* cite book
first = Karl
last = Kempf
year = 1961
title = Electronic Computers Within The Ordnance Corps
chapter = Chapter 2: ENIAC
chapterurl = http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/61ordnance/chap2.html
location = Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD
* [http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.19980527_goldstine.html IBM Research names mathematics fellowship for computer pioneer Herman Goldstine]
* cite book
first = Gina
last = DeAngelis
coauthors = Bianco, David J.
title = Computers: processing the data
publisher = Oliver Press
location = Minneapolis
year = 2005
id = ISBN 1-881508-87-0