Arthur W. Burks
American philosopher and computer-scientist, who taught for a long time at the University of Michigan.
First of all, he is one of the best scholars on Charles Sanders Peirce. He has been working on Peirce's philosophy from the begining of his career; he studied and edited a considerable portion of Peirce's manuscripts at Harvard.
However, since Burks could not find a job when he obtained Ph.D., he went to the Moore School of Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, in order to learn electric engineering. There, he met Mauchly and others, and got involved in the project of ENIAC (one of the earliest digial computers); this large-scale machine was designed mainly for calculating artillery trajectories for Ballistic Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, US Army. In short, in order to make firing tables to be used for the war, a tremendous amount of calculation was needed, and that's why such a huge machine was planned. Anyway, thanks to this project, Burks met two other important persons: John von Neumann and Alice (Burks's wife); the latter was one of the human computers for the Ballistic Lab.
During (and mainly after) the war, the new project of EDVAC (stored-program machine) began, with von Neumann joined to the ENIAC team. But a quarrel arised and Burks moved with von Neumann to the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton; there von Neumann began to construct IAS machine, with Burks and others collaborating. Later, Burks edited and completed von Neuman's unfinished manuscript on self-reproducing automata, which introduced the notion of "cellular automata", now widely known by the works of "artificial life" advocated by Chris Langton (the last Ph.D. of Burks).
In the meantime, Burks met Carnap and Leonard Savage (renowned Bayesian) at the University of Chicago, and formed his own philosophy of induction, probability, and causality, drawing on the works of Hume, Kant, Peirce, Keynes, Ramsey, Carnap, or C.I.Lewis, among others. A systematic presentation of this was made in his Chance, Cause, Reason (1977).
He founded the department of computer and comunication sciences in the Univesity of Michigan, and he taught there as well as in the phiosophy department. He directed "The Logic of Computers Group", and John Holland was one of the most active members; many of Holland's ideas (now well known through Santa Fe Institute) for "complex adaptive systems" were formed in the activities of this group.
During the 60's and the 70's, Burks formed the philosophy of logical mechanism, which was presented in his Festschrift, The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism (1990, ed. by M.H.Salmon). At the same time, he was working (together with his wife Alice) on the history of computers, and one of the results is The First Electronic Computer: the Atanasoff Story (1988) ; in this, they clarified the source of some of the essential ideas for ENIAC, i.e., the Atanasoff-Berry Computer constructed at Iowa State University, well before the ENIAC project. Mauchly visited there, and used Atanasoff's ideas for the design of ENIAC, without crediting. Burks's fair research and judgment are now widely recognized.
