Frederick P. Brooks Jr., Computer Design Innovator, Dies at 91

Dr. Brooks received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1956; his adviser was Howard Aiken, a physicist and computer pioneer. He was a teaching assistant for Kenneth Iverson, an early designer of programming languages, who taught a course on “automatic data processing.”

Industry as well as academia was increasingly adopting computers. Dr. Brooks had summer jobs at Marathon Oil and North American Aviation, and at Bell Labs and IBM.

He also met his future wife, Nancy Greenwood, at Harvard, where she earned a master’s degree in physics. They married two days after Harvard’s commencement ceremony. Then, Dr. Brooks recalled in an oral history interview for the Computer History Museum, they took off together to jobs at IBM.

During his IBM years, Dr. Brooks became what his son described as “a convinced and committed Christian” after attending Bible study sessions hosted by his colleague and fellow computer designer Dr. Blaauw. “I came to see that the intellectual difficulties I was having as a scientist with Christianity were secondary,” Dr. Brooks recalled in the Computer History Museum interview. He taught Sunday school for over 50 years at a Methodist church in Chapel Hill and served as a leader and faculty adviser to Christian study and fellowship groups at the university.

In addition to his son Roger, Dr. Brooks is survived by his wife; his brother, John Brooks; two more children, Kenneth Brooks and Barbara La Dine; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Dr. Brooks collected many prizes for his achievements, including the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1985 and the Turing Award, often called the Nobel of computer science, in 1999.

The major prizes typically cited his work in computer design and software engineering. But during his years at North Carolina, Dr. Brooks also turned to computer graphics and virtual reality, seeing it as an emerging and important field. He led research efforts that experts say included techniques for fast and realistic presentation of images and applications for studying molecules in biology.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/technology/frederick-p-brooks-jr-dead.html