Edward Fredkin

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Edward Fredkin (born 1934) is an early pioneer of digital physics (in recent work he uses the term digital philosophy (DP)). His main 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.

Edward Fredkin dropped out of Caltech after one year and, at age 19, joined the USAF and became a jet fighter pilot. Fredkin’s computer career started in 1956 when the Air Force assigned him to work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He worked at BBN in the early 1960s where he wrote the PDP-1 assembler.

In 1968 Fredkin returned to academia, starting at MIT as a full professor. From 1971 to 1974 he was Director of Project MAC. He spent a year at Caltech as a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, working with Richard Feynman, and was a Professor of Physics at Boston University for 6 years. More recently he has been a Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and also a Visiting Professor at MIT.

Fredkin founded Information International Inc. and has served as the CEO of a diverse set of companies, including Information International, Three Rivers Computer Corporation, New England Television Corporation (owner of Boston's then CBS affiliate, WNEV, channel 7) and others.

Fredkin has been broadly interested in computation: hardware and software. He is the inventor of many things including the trie data structure, the Fredkin gate and the Billiard-Ball Computer Model for reversible computing. He has also been involved in computer vision, chess and other areas of Artificial Intelligence research. Fredkin also works at the intersection of theoretical issues in the physics of computation and computational models of physics. He recently developed Salt, a model of computation based on fundamental conservation laws from physics (link to paper below).

An interesting profile of Edward Fredkin along with a wonderfully readable explanation of some of his theories can be found in part one of the 1988 book Three Scientists and Their Gods by Robert Wright.