request for rememberances of Julian Bigelow

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: George Dyson <gdyson () cc wwu edu>
Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 18:29:11 -0500
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Julian Bigelow, 89, Computer Pioneer, Is Dead

Thanks to John Markoff for giving Julian Bigelow the tribute he
deserves. IPers might appreciate the rest of that remarkable paragraph
(below) where Julian encapsulated the sprit that brought him to the
Institute in 1946. For the upcoming memorial for Julian in Princeton,
and the long-term project I am working on here at IAS, I (and the
Bigelow family) would enjoy hearing from anyone with remembrances of
Julian Bigelow and his work.


³A long chain of improbable chance events led to our involvement.
People ordinarily of modest aspirations, we all worked so hard and
selflessly because we believed--we knew--it was happening here and at a
few other places right then, and we were lucky to be in on it. We were
sure because von Neumann cleared the cobwebs from our minds as nobody
else could have done. A tidal wave of computational power was about to
break and inundate everything in science and much elsewhere, and things
would never be the same afterward. It would cleanse and solve areas of
obscurity and debate that had piled up for decades. Those who really
understood what they were trying to do would be able to express their
ideas as coded instructions, calculate with powerful machines, and find
answers and demonstrate explicitly by numerical experiments. The
process would advance and solidify knowledge and tend to keep men
honest.²


--Julian Bigelow, ³Computer Development at the Institute for Advanced
Study,² in Nicholas Metropolis, J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota, eds.,
A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (New York: Academic
Press, 1980), p. 291.


-----------------------------------------------------------------
George Dyson                                       gdyson () ias edu

Institute for Advanced Study      (Director's Visitor, 2002-2003)

Mailing address:      252 von Neumann Drive, Princeton, NJ, 08540

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