Edward Fredkin

Edward Fredkin (born 1935) is a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and an early pioneer of digital physics. His primary contributions include his work on reversible computing and cellular automata. While Konrad Zuse's book, Calculating Space (1969), mentioned the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin gate represented the essential breakthrough. In recent work, he uses the term digital philosophy (DP). During his career Fredkin also served on the faculties of MIT in Computer Science, was a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech, and Research Professor of Physics at Boston University.

Early life

At age 19, Ed Fredkin left California Institute of Technology (Caltech) college after a year to join the United States Air Force (USAF) to become a fighter pilot. Ed Fredkin has worked with a number of companies in the computer field and has held academic positions at a number of universities. He is a computer programmer, a pilot, advisor to businesses and governments and a physicist. His main interests concern digital computer like models of basic processes in physics.