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Alice Burks (née Rowe, August 20, 1920 – November 21, 2017) was an American author of children's books and books about the history ofelectronic computers.
Burks was bornAlice Rowe inEast Cleveland, Ohio, in 1920. She began her undergraduate degree atOberlin College on a competitivemathematics scholarship and transferred to theUniversity of Pennsylvania inPhiladelphia where she completed her B.A. in mathematics in 1944. During this period, she was employed as ahuman computer at theUniversity of Pennsylvania'sMoore School of Electrical Engineering.
Burks retired from full-time employment after marrying Moore School lecturer Dr.Arthur Burks, a mathematician who served as one of the principal engineers in the construction of theENIAC, the world's first general-purpose electronic digital computer, built at the Moore School between 1943 and 1946. Unlike some of the Moore Schoolwomen computers, she never worked directly with the ENIAC.
At the conclusion of Arthur's work with the Moore School and at theInstitute for Advanced Study in 1946, Burks moved with her husband toAnn Arbor, Michigan, where he joined the faculty of theUniversity of Michigan and helped to found the computer science department. She returned to school, earning an M.S. ineducational psychology in 1957 from Michigan.
Starting in the 1970s following the decision ofHoneywell v. Sperry Rand, the federal court case that invalidated the ENIAC patent, she and husband Arthur championed the work ofJohn Vincent Atanasoff, theIowa State College physics professor whom the court had ruled invented the first electronic digital computer (a machine that came to be called theAtanasoff–Berry Computer) and from whom the subject matter of the ENIAC was ruled to be derived. In articles and two books, the first co-authored with Arthur, Mrs. Burks sought to bolster the judge's decision and highlight testimony and evidence from the case. This pitted the Burkses in a deeply acrimonious controversy against exponents of ENIAC inventorsJohn Mauchly andJ. Presper Eckert.
Burks later lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was assisting her husbandArthur Burks with writing his memoirs and preparing his papers for university donation. Arthur died on May 14, 2008.[1] Burks died in November 2017 at the age of 97.[2]
