Wallace John Eckert
American astronomer (1902-1971)
Wallace John Eckert (June 19, 1902 – August 24, 1971) was an American astronomer, who directed the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau at Columbia University which evolved into the research division of IBM.
Life
Eckert was born in Pittsburgh on June 19, 1902. Shortly thereafter, his parents John and Anna Margaret (née Heil) Eckert moved to Erie County, Pennsylvania, where they raised their four sons on a farm in Albion, PA. Wallace graduated from Albion High School in a class of six boys and eight girls. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1925, and earned an MA from Amherst College in 1926.
He started teaching at Columbia University in 1926, and earned his PhD from Yale in 1931 in astronomy under Professor Ernest William Brown (1866–1938).
He married Dorothy Woodworth Applegate in 1932. They raised three children, Alice, John and Penelope.
He was not related to another computer pioneer of the time, J. Presper Eckert (1919–1995).
He attended the launch of Apollo 14 just before his death August 24, 1971, in New Jersey.
A lunar crater, located within Mare Crisium, is named in his honor.
Solution of differential equations for astronomy
Around 1933, Eckert proposed interconnecting punched card tabulating machines from IBM located in Columbia's Rutherford Laboratory to perform more than simple statistical calculations.
“Wallace John Eckert” enters the record as american astronomer (1902-1971). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wallace, John and Eckert can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wallace John Eckert” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.