Earl Isaac

Earl Judson Isaac (7 August 1921 – 12 December 1983), along with friend Bill Fair, set up the company Fair Isaac in a small studio apartment on Lincoln Ave. in San Rafael, California in the year 1956. He was born in Buffalo, NY and died in 1983 in Novato, California. He graduated from Annapolis with a mathematics degree , and was stationed on the USS Missouri while in the United States Navy. After being discharged from the Navy and before founding Fair, Isaac and Company, he worked at SRI (then known as Stanford Research Institute), along with Bill Fair, during SRI's beginning years. While working at SRI, he was the first person to 'crash' a computer, a behemoth at SRI known as ENIAC, by feeding it a complex mathematical problem it could not solve (he had successfully solved the problem manually). This event supported his view that computers would/will never be able to completely replace a human being. He was also of the opinion that a computer is only as smart as the person programming it. That said, he had experimented with artificial intelligence as early as 1950.

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