Franz Alt (mathematician)
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Dr. Franz L. Alt (born 1910 in Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian born American mathematician who made major contributions to computer science in its early days.
Franz Alt grew up in Austria and received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Vienna in 1932, researching set-theoretic topology and logical foundations of geometry.
He left Austria for the United States after the 1938 Anschluss. An avid skier, he served in the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division during World War II reaching the rank of Second Lieutenant. After the war, he worked on the ENIAC and other Army computing projects; later he worked in the Computing Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards, and eventually at the American Institute of Physics.
He is best known as one of the founders of the Association for Computing Machinery, having served as its president from 1950 to 1952; he also wrote one of the first books on digital computers, Electronic Digital Computers (Academic Press, 1958).
After retirement in 1973 he became active in a number of peace, justice and outdoors organizations. In 1994 he was inducted as an ACM Fellow.
He is presently the oldest surviving president of the ACM.
[edit] References
- Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (Springer, 1998). Contributor Bio.
