About Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German-American computer scientist and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the namesake of the Weizenbaum Award and the Weizenbaum Institute. == Life and career == Born in Berlin, Germany, to Jewish parents, he escaped Nazi Germany in January 1936, immigrating with his family to the United States. He started studying mathematics in 1941 at Wayne State University, in Detroit, Michigan. In 1942, he interrupted his studies to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps as a meteorologist, having been turned down for cryptology work because of his "enemy alien" status. After the war, in 1946, he returned to Wayne State, obtaining his B.S. in Mathematics in 1948, and his M.S. in 1950. Around 1952, as a research assistant at Wayne, Weizenbaum worked on analog computers and helped create a digital computer. In 1956, he worked for General Electric on ERMA, a computer system that introduced the use of the magnetically encoded fonts imprinted on the bottom border of checks, allowing automated check processing via magnetic ink character recognition (MICR). He published a short paper in Datamation in 1962 entitled "How to Make a Computer Appear Intelligent" that described the strategy used in a Gomoku program that could beat novice players. In 1963 he took a position of associate professor at MIT on the strength of his SLIP (Symmetric List Processing) software.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.