Howard Hathaway Aiken (March 8, 1900, Hoboken, New Jersey-March 14 1973, St. Louis, Missouri) was a pioneer in computing, being the primary engineer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer. He studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and later obtained his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 1939. During this time, he encountered differential equations that he could only solve numerically. Wikipedia
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