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Arthur Walter Burks (born October 13, 1915 in Duluth, Minnesota) is an American mathematician who in the 1940s as a senior engineer on the project 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.

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 The Moore School 2.1 The ENIAC 3 The IAS 4 The University of Michigan 4.1 Restoration of parts of the ENIAC 4.2 Patent dispute 4.3 The BACH Group 4.4 As professor emeritus 5 Bibliography

Burks earned his B.A. in mathematics and physics from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana in 1936 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1937 and 1941, respectively.

The summer after obtaining his Ph.D., the young Dr. Burks moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and enrolled in the national defense electronics course offered by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering; his laboratory teaching assistant was J. Presper Eckert, a graduate student at the Moore School; a fellow student was John Mauchly, the chairman of the physics department at Ursinus College in nearby Collegeville, Pennsylvania. Both Burks and Mauchly sought and obtained teaching positions at the Moore School the following fall, and roomed together throughout the academic year.

When Mauchly and Eckert's proposed concept for an electronic digital computer was funded by the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory in June 1943, Burks was added to the design team. Among his principal contributions to the project was the design of the high-speed multiplier unit. (Also during this time, Burks met and married Alice Rowe, a computer employed at the Moore School.)

In April 1945, with John Grist Brainerd, Burks was charged with writing the technical reports on the ENIAC for publication. Also during 1945 Burks assisted with the preliminary logical design of the EDVAC in meetings attended by Mauchly, Eckert, John von Neumann, and others.

Burks also took a part-time position as a philosophy instructor at Swarthmore College during 1945-1946.

On March 8, 1946 Burks accepted an offer by von Neumann to join the computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and joined full time the following summer. (Already on the project was another member of the ENIAC team, Herman Goldstine. Together, Goldstine and Burks gave nine of the Moore School Lectures in Summer 1946.) During his time at the IAS, Burks worked to expand von Neumann's theory of automata.

After working on this project, Burks relocated to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1946 to join the faculty of the University of Michigan, first as an assistant professor of philosophy, and as a full professor by 1954. He helped found the university's computer science department, first as the Logic of Computers group in 1956, of which he was the director, then as a graduate program in 1957, and then as an undergraduate program within the new Department of Computer and Communication in 1967, which he chaired until 1971. He declined a position heading up a different university's computing center, citing his primary interest as the purely theoretical aspects of computing machines.

Burks edited volumes VII-VIII of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, published 1958.

In the 1960s he was presented with the opportunity to acquire four units of the original ENIAC, which had been rusting in a storage Quonset hut in Aberdeen, Maryland. He ran the units through a car wash before restoring them and donating them to the University of Michigan. They are currently on display in the entryway of the Computer Science Building near the "foo bar" snack cafeteria.

In 1964 Burks was approached by attorney Sy Yuter and asked to join T. Kite Sharpless and Robert F. Shaw in litigation that would add their names as inventors to the ENIAC patent, which would allow them to profit from the sale of licenses to the premiere electronic digital computer apart from Sperry Rand, the company that owned the Eckert-Mauchly interest in the patent and was at that time seeking royalties from other computer manufacturers. This endeavor was never successful; in the 1973 decision to Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, U.S. District Judge Earl R. Larson ruled—even as he invalidated the patent—that only Mauchly and Eckert had invented the ENIAC, and that Burks, Sharpless, and Shaw could not be added as inventors.

In the 1970s Burks began meeting with Bob Axelrod, Michael Cohen, and John Holland, researchers with interests in interdisciplinary approaches to studying complex adaptive systems. Known as the BACH group (an acronym of their surnames), it came to include, among others, Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Hofstadter, and survives today as the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems (CSCS).

In the 1970s and 1980s Burks, working with his wife Alice, authored a number of articles on the ENIAC, and a book on the Atanasoff–Berry Computer.

In 1990, Burks donated a portion of his papers to the university's Bentley Historical Library, where they are accessible to researchers.

Suffering from dementia, Burks is currently writing his memoirs and resides in an assisted living facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

• Burks, Arthur W., Goldstine, Herman H., and von Neumann, John (1946), Preliminary discussion of the logical design of an electronic computing instrument, 42 pages, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, June 1946, [2nd ed.] edition (February 16, 1947), Eprint.
• Burks, Arthur W. and Copi, Irving M. (1950), Lewis Carroll's barber shop paradox, University Press, offprinted from Mind, vol. LIX, pp. 219-222, April 1950.
• Burks, Arthur W. and Wright, Jesse Bowdle (1952), Theory of Logical Nets. Amazon says: published by Burroughs Adding Machine Co.; Google Books says: published by University of Michigan Engineering Research Institute; 52 pages.
• Burks, Arthur W. and Copi, Irving M. (1954), The logical design of an idealized general-purpose computer, Amazon says: published by Burroughs Corporation Research Center; Google Books says: published by University of Michigan Engineering Research Institute, 154 pages.
• Burks, Arthur W. (1956), The logic of fixed and growing automata, Engineering Research Institute, University of Michigan, 34 pages.
• Burks, Arthur W. and Wang, Hao (1956), The logic of automata, Amazon says: published by Air Research and Development Command; Google Books says: published by University of Michigan Engineering Research Institute; 60 pages.
• Peirce, Charles Sanders and Burks, Arthur W., ed. (1958), the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce Volumes 7 and 8, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, also Belnap Press (of Harvard University Press) edition, vols. 7-8 bound together, 798 pages (ISBN 0-674-13803-1), released in InteLex CD-ROM, reprinted in 1998 Thoemmes Continuum.
• Burks, Arthur W., Wang, Hao, and Holland, John Henry (1959), Application of logic to the design of computing machines: Final report, University of Michigan Research Institute, under contract with the USAF, 26 pages.
• Von Neumann, John and Burks, Arthur W. (1966), Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, by John von Neumann, edited and completed by Arthur W. Burks, Univ. of Illinois Press.
• Burks, Arthur W. (1971), Essays on Cellular Automata, University of Illinois Press, 375 pages, hardcover (ISBN 978-0252000232, ISBN 0252000234).
• Burks, Arthur W. (1978), Review of The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, Carolyn Eisele, ed., in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 84, no. 5, September 1978, Project Euclid Eprint PDF 791KB.
• Burks, Arthur W. (1978), Chance, Cause and Reason: An Inquiry into the Nature of Scientific Evidence, by Arthur W. Burks, University of Chicago Press, 694 pages, hardcover (ISBN 978-0226080871, ISBN 0226080870), paperback (ISBN 978-0226080888, ISBN 0226080889).
• Burks, Arthur W. and Burks, Alice R. (1981), "The ENIAC: First General-Purpose Electronic Computer", Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 3, no. 4, October 1981, pp. 310-399. ISSN 1058-6180
• Burks, Arthur W. (1986), Robots and free minds, by Arthur W. Burks, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University of Michigan, 97 pages.
• Burks, Alice R. and Burks, Arthur W. (1988), The First Electronic Computer: The Atanasoff Story, 400 pages, University of Michigan Press, hardcover (ISBN 978-0472100903, ISBN 0472100904), paperback (ISBN 978-0472081042, ISBN 0472081047), UMP catalog page.
• Salmon, Merrilee H., ed. (1990), The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism: Essays in honor of Arthur W. Burks with his responses, 552 pages, hardcover (ISBN 978-0792303251, ISBN 0792303253).
• Burks, Alice R. (2003), Who Invented the Computer?: The Legal Battle That Changed History, foreword by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, 415 pages, hardcover (ISBN 978-1591020349 ISBN 1-59102-034-4), Prometheus catalog page.

A number of articles by Arthur W. Burks are listed on page 599 in index of Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce by Nathan Houser, Don D. Roberts, James Van Evraof, Google Book Search Beta page 599.