Forman S. Acton
Forman 'Sinnickson Acton' was an American computer scientist, engineer, educator and author. He was an emeritus professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University.
Education
Acton began his education in the Salem City School system. He left at the end of 9th grade to attend boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1939. He then attended Princeton University, obtaining his Bachelor of Science degree in 1943, and his Master of Science degree in chemical engineering in 1944.He was drafted into the Army in June 1944, and worked for the U.S. Army at Oak Ridge, at a facility that played a key role in the Manhattan Project, for the remainder of World War II. After the war, he became the second graduate from Carnegie Institute of Technology to earn a Ph.D. in applied mathematics.
Career
Acton spent three years at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards' Institute for Numerical Analysis at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he worked on a machine called SWAC, one of the first digital computers.In 1952, he returned to Princeton to teach in the mathematics department, and served as director of the Analytical Research Group. While there, his group worked on military weapons, contributing to systems such as the U-2 spy plane and the Nike anti-aircraft missile. He also became an expert and teacher on the IAS Machine, another of the first computers, which was located at the Institute for Advanced Study.
During this time, Acton worked with other important figures in early computing, including Princeton Professor John Tukey, who coined the terms "software" and "bit," and Thomas Kurtz, who went on to co-invent the computer language BASIC. Other contemporaries he knew and worked with included Albert W. Tucker, Grace Hopper, Richard Feynman, James H. Wilkinson, Claude Shannon, John Backus, and John Nash.
Acton moved to the Department of Electrical Engineering in 1955. In 1963, he made the first of two extended visits to the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, India, where he helped establish the school's early computing facilities and courses. He initially stayed for one year, and he returned in 1967 to teach and offer organizational advice.
As computing evolved, Princeton's electrical engineering department added "computer science" to its name before the Department of Computer Science became its own department in 1985. Acton retired as professor of computer science in 1989.