Edward Fredkin (October 2, 1934 - June 13, 2023) was an American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman who was an early pioneer of digital physics. He contributed to reversible computing and cellular automata, including the invention of the Fredkin gate, and later advocated a worldview he called digital philosophy, which holds that all physical processes are computations. Fredkin held academic positions at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Boston University, among others, despite never having earned a college degree.
Fredkin's career spanned industry and academia, and he was known for connecting computation with physics. He founded several companies and developed influential hardware and software concepts, including the first modern interrupt system and the trie data structure. His work on reversible computing and cellular automata influenced later research in quantum computing, computer science, and the philosophy of physics.
Early Life and Education
Fredkin was born in Los Angeles, California. His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants, and he was the youngest of four children. His mother, a concert pianist who never performed professionally, died of cancer when he was 11. His father, a businessman who lost his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, left the family relatively poor. Fredkin often lived with other families or with his older sister. He was an entrepreneur from a young age, handling a large newspaper delivery route and making illegal fireworks at age 10.
He performed poorly in school, but graduated from John Marshall High School a semester early to earn money for Caltech tuition. Caltech admitted him despite reportedly being the worst high school grades ever seen. He enrolled in 1952, but left partway through his sophomore year. To avoid being drafted into the Korean War, he joined the United States Air Force in 1952, training as a fighter pilot. He was not deployed to the war, and his computer career began in 1956 when the Air Force assigned him to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory to work on the SAGE air-defense computer.
Career at BBN and Digital Equipment
After completing his military service in 1958, Fredkin was hired by J. C. R. Licklider at Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN), a research firm focusing on computer and information technologies. At a conference in December 1959, he saw a prototype of the PDP-1 computer, the first commercial minicomputer, which he recommended BBN purchase the first unit ever produced. The machine arrived without software, so Fredkin developed the first assembler language, which he called FRAP (Free of Rules Assembly Program), and its operating system. He also organized the DECUS in 1961 and designed significant hardware modifications to the PDP-1 to support the time-sharing system. He invented the first modern interrupt system for the PDP-1, which Digital called the 'Sequence Break.'
In 1962, Fredkin founded Information International, Inc., a computer technology company that developed high-precision film-to-digital scanners. The company went public, making Fredkin a millionaire. In 1968, Marvin Minsky recruited him to join MIT as a full professor, despite his lack of a college education, after meeting Fredkin at BBN. Fredkin served as Director of Project MAC from 1971 to 1974 (later renamed the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science). He worked on Artificial intelligence research, including computer vision and chess, and he was associated with MIT for many years, including as a visiting scientist at the Media Lab.
Later Academic Career and Companies
After leaving MIT, Fredkin spent a year at Caltech as Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, where he taught Richard Feynman about computing and learned quantum mechanics. He was a professor of physics at Boston University for six years, and later had a long-term association with Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and later Robotics (as of 2022). He also founded or led several companies, including Information International, Three Rivers Computer Corporation, New England Television Corporation (which owned the Boston CBS affiliate WNEV), and an advanced sea water desalination company. He was also a consultant for business and government.
Key Contributions to Computing
Fredkin invented the trie data structure independently of René de la Briandais, who published a year earlier. He developed radio transponders for vehicle identification, the concept of computer navigation for automobiles, the Fredkin gate, and the Billiard-Ball Computer Model for reversible computing. He also worked on computer vision and chess, which are subfields of Artificial intelligence.
Physics and Computation
Fredkin's main interest was in digital mechanics, the study of discrete models of fundamental processes in physics. He believed that the universe is a discrete, computational system, not a continuous, analog one. His 1969 book by<br><br>
Fredkin's Digital Philosophy
Digital Philosophy
Reversible Computing and the Fredkin Gate
Intensive Work at Various Universities
later life and legacy
See Also
References
Sources
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