Dr. Frank Matthew Verzuh

Frank M. Verzuh was an electrical engineer, scientist and early pioneer in the computing field. His achievements ranged from showing how punched card equipment of the 1940s, intended only for straightforward business and tabulating functions, could be effectively utilized for scientific computing to the commercial application of stored program digital computer systems in banking, brokerage, financial markets and business in general. He was active in the ACM from its beginning, was president of SHARE, one of the largest and earliest computer user groups, in 1959 and 1960 and held positions in several other professional societies. His research activities included international cooperation with scientists and businesses in, for example, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany and Russia. His courses in computing were among the first offered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He planned and implemented the first freshman elective in computing offered at M.I.T. in the latter 1950s. Frank M. Verzuh worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1940 until 1960, beginning as a research assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering, earning his SM degree in 1946 and his SCD in 1952 and becoming the first Assistant Director of the Computation Center in 1956. He advised clients on various aspects of using computers effectively in large organizations and was a consultant to governmental agencies. Before and during World War II he worked under Vannevar Bush on differential analyzers and the Rapid Arithmetic Machine. Together with other leading researchers he attended the renowned Moore School Lectures in 1946. His notes are the only remaining ones for some of those lectures. He was one of the lecturers at the IBM Scientific Computation Forum 1948.