Edward Forrest Moore

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Edward Forrest Moore (1925-2003) was a theoretical computer scientist. He was the first to use the type of Finite State Machine that is most commonly used today, the Moore FSM. With Claude Shannon he did seminal work on computability theory and making reliable circuits using less reliable relays. He also spent a great deal of his later years on a fruitless effort to solve the Four Color Theorem.

[edit] Biography

He received a B.S. in Chemistry from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1947 in Blacksburg, Montgomery co, Va. He received a degree in Ph.D. in Mathematics from Brown University in Jun 1950 in Providence, Providence co, RI. He worked at UIUC 1950-1952, then was a visiting lecturer at MIT and Harvard simultaneously in 1952-53. Then He worked at Bell Labs for about 10 years. After that, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He married Elinor Constance Martin and had three children.

[edit] Publications

With Claude Shannon, before and during his time at Bell Labs, he coauthored "Gedanken-experiments on sequential machines", "Computability by Probabilistic Machines", "Machine Aid for Switching Circuit Design", and "Reliable Circuits Using Less Reliable Relays".

At Bell Labs he authored "Variable Length Binary Encodings", "The Shortest Path Through a Maze", "A simplified universal turing machine", and "Complete Relay Decoding Networks".