Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
himself. He was born in 1920 and grew up on a small farm in
Camrose, Alberta. From childhood on, he expressed an interest
in and demonstrated a talent for mathematics. However, at age
thirteen, he came to the conclusion that high school was useful
only for would-be teachers, and he certainly didn't find teaching
appealing. Consequently, having little educational guidance at
home, he quit school and went to work on a farm.
In 1946, Iverson was a twenty-six-year-old veteran of the
Second World War entering university in search of a new life.
Within a few years, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in
Mathematics and Physics from Queen's University and, soon
after, was awarded a scholarship to do graduate work at Har-
vard University. One of the first courses that Iverson took at
Harvard was taught by Howard Hathaway Aiken. “To me, it
[Aiken's course] was a revelation,” said Iverson. “It was the first
time when I encountered a course or a professor who suggested
that there were still useful things that can be done.”
Aiken's classes were packed. He was not only a first-rate
scholar and the director of Harvard's Computation Laboratory,
but also a renowned designer and builder of digital “electronic
brains.” When Iverson first stepped onto Harvard's campus,
Aiken had four powerful calculating machines to his credit -
named Mark I , II , III , and IV and conceived between 1937
and 1950. Under Aiken, and using Aiken's Mark IV computer,
Iverson completed his doctoral work in 1954. Soon after, he
started his independent work on a symbolic language to be
known as “Iverson notation.”
The origin of Iverson's notation was the Automated Data
Processing program that Aiken instituted at Harvard and that
Iverson was a part of, which focused on the applied side of com-
puting and on computer education. While teaching and writing
a book on automated data processing, Iverson realized that to
explain concepts such as sorting algorithms concisely, he needed
an expanded system of notation - a system both simpler and
 
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search