Alice Rowe Burks is an American author of children"s books and books about the history of electronic computers.
Education
Born Alice Rowe, she began her undergraduate degree at Oberlin College on a competitive mathematics scholarship and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where she completed her Bachelor of Arts in mathematics in 1944.
Career
During this period, she was employed as a human computer at the University of Pennsylvania"s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. She retired from full-time work after marrying Moore School lecturer Doctor Arthur Burks, a mathematician who served as one of the principal engineers in the construction of the ENIAC, the world"s first general-purpose electronic digital computer, built at the Moore School between 1943 and 1946. Unlike some of the Moore School women computers, Alice never worked directly with the ENIAC. At the conclusion of Arthur"s work with the Moore School and at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1946, Alice moved with Arthur to Ann Arbor, Michigan where he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan and helped to found the computer science department.
She returned to school, earning an Master of Surgery in educational psychology in 1957 from Michigan.
Starting in the 1970s following the decision of Honeywell v. In articles and two books, the first co-authored with Arthur, Mistress
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 inventors John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
Arthur died on May 14, 2008.