Arthur Walter Burks was an American mathematician who worked in the 1940s as a senior engineer on the project that contributed to the design of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. Decades later, Burks and his wife Alice Burks outlined their case for the subject matter of the ENIAC having been derived from John Vincent Atanasoff. Burks was also for several decades a faculty member at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Arthur Burks in 2001
ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was the first to have them all. It was Turing-complete and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.
Four ENIAC panels and one of its three function tables at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania
Glenn A. Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program ENIAC in BRL building 328. (U.S. Army photo, c. 1947–1955)
Cpl. Irwin Goldstein (foreground) sets the switches on one of ENIAC's function tables at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. (U.S. Army photo)
Programmers Betty Jean Jennings (left) and Fran Bilas (right) operating ENIAC's main control panel at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, c. 1945 (U.S. Army photo from the archives of the ARL Technical Library)