Complex number calculator de george stibitz biography

George Stibitz (1904 - 1995)

At about the same time as Claude Shannon was working on his masters thesis on boolean algebra and electronic circuitry, George Stibitz, a Bell Labs researcher, had a similar thought.

Realising that boolean logic could be used for the circuitry of electromechanical telephone relays, Stibitz gathered together a conglomeration of old relays, batteries, flashlight bulbs, wires, and tin strips - and sat down at his kitchen table in 1937 to fiddle.

The result was the prototype binary adder circuit - an electromechanical circuit that controlled binary addition. Stibitz incorporated his new circuitry into his Model K (the K standing for - appropriately, if less than imaginatively - Kitchen) digital calculator.

Stibitz took his circuit back to Bell Labs and over the next two years, working in conjunction with Samuel Williams, devised a machine that could calculate all four basic mathematical functions with complex numbers.

The Complex Number Calculat