Julian Himley Bigelow
(1913-2003)
PIONEER IN DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITAL COMPUTERS
Julian Himley Bigelow was a pioneer in the development of digital computers and in cybernetics. Recruited to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton in 1946, he went on to assist as chief engineer on one of the world’s earliest digital computers. Known as the “IAS” machine after the Institute, it established the basic template for all the digital computers that have followed.
He was born in Nutley in 1913 and a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering. From an early age he was an outstanding engineer and mathematician. His resume is vast having worked at the Sperry Corporation, Columbia University, IBM, Princeton University, and MIT. At MIT, he worked alongside colleagues to conceptualize anti-aircraft fire control tactics and equipment for the U.S. military. He later went on to write with mathematician Norbert Wiener and neurophysiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” an influential paper that formed the basis for the field of cybernetics.
Bigelow’s association with Wiener also led to his being part of the “core group” of the Macy Conferences, a series of interdisciplinary meetings sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation from 1946 to 1953, out of which came advances in systems theory, cognitive science, and cybernetics. In the final years of World War Il and its immediate conclusion, from 1943 to 1946, Bigelow moved to Columbia University as an Associate Director for the Statistical Research Group of the National Defense Research Council’s Applied Mathematics Panel, a small unit of mathematicians and statisticians that worked on military problems using mathematical methods.
In 1946 John Von Neumann offered Bigelow the position of Chief Engineer for a developing project to build a large-scale computer on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study, termed the Electronic Computer Project. Bigelow took up the position in 1946 and he remained with the project through its conclusion in 1957, continued to provide assistance in 1957-1958 while it was under the administrative control of Princeton University, and he oversaw the donation of the machine to the Smithsonian Institution in 1962.
Bigelow was named a Permanent Member of the Institute in 1951. Originally affiliated with the School of Mathematics, he moved to the School of Natural Sciences in 1970. For many decades, Bigelow provided consulting services for a variety of public and private entities, including the Atomic Energy Commission, RCA, and the National Academy of Sciences. Mr. Bigelow passed away in 2003 in Princeton, NJ.