Career
Fredkin's field was physics, but he became involved with computers in 1956 when he was sent by the Air Force, where he had trained as a jet pilot, to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. In the early 1960s, Fredkin joined contract research firm Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) where he wrote a PDP-1 assembler called FRAP (Fredkin’s Assembly Program) and participated in early projects using the machine. On completing his service, Fredkin was hired by J. C. R. Licklider at the research firm Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN). After seeing the PDP-1 prototype at the December 1959, Eastern Joint Computer Conference in Boston, Fredkin recommended that BBN purchase a PDP-1 to support Licklider’s research into psychoacoustics. Working directly with DEC, Fredkin and others at BBN made significant modifications to the PDP-1. He went on to become a major contributor in the field of artificial intelligence.
In 1968, Fredkin returned to academia, starting at MIT as a full professor. From 1971 to 1974, Fredkin was the Director of Project MAC at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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 of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (West) and also a Visiting Scientist at MIT Media Laboratory. He is a Visiting Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Fredkin founded Information International Inc. and has served as the CEO of a diverse set of companies, including Information International, Three Rivers Computer Corporation, and New England Television Corporation (owner of Boston's then CBS affiliate, WNEV, channel 7).
Fredkin has been broadly interested in computation: hardware and software. He is the inventor of 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 (Miller & Fredkin 2005).
A profile of Edward Fredkin along with a readable explanation of some of his theories can be found in the first part of Three Scientists and Their Gods by Robert Wright (1988). The section of the book covering Fredkin was excerpted in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1988.
Ed Fredkin has had a long interest in Computer Science and Physics. He has been on the faculties of MIT in Computer Science, Caltech and Boston University in Physics. While at MIT he served as the Director of LCS. Fredkin has also had an association with Carnegie Mellon for a number of years. His current academic interests are in Digital Mechanics; the study of discrete models of fundamental process in Physics.
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