Willis Ware
- Birthdate
- 1920/08/31
- Birthplace
- Atlantic City, NJ, USA
- Associated organizations
- Hazeltine Electronics Corporation, Institute of Advanced Study, RAND Corporation
- Fields of study
- Radar, Computing
Biography
Willis H. Ware (IRE Associate, 1943; Senior Member, 1949; and Fellow, 1962) was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey on 31 August 1920. He received the B.S. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 1941, and as a Tau Beta Pi Fellow, the S.M. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1942, both in electrical engineering, and the Ph.D. degree, in 1951, from Princeton University.
From 1942 to 1946, Ware worked for the Hazeltine Electronics Corporation, in Little Neck, New York, where he did research and development in radar and IFF. In 1946, he became one of the original members of the staff of the Electronic Computer Project at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and focused on the design and development of the large-scale general-purpose electronic digital computer, which later was to set the pattern for the construction of several other "Princeton-class" machines. In 1952, Ware joined the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where in 1962, he was Associate Head of the Computer Sciences Department. This department was concerned principally with the development of large machines and their application to military and scientific problems.
Ware was an IRE Fellow and a member of the ACM, the AAAS, Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, Eta Kappa Nu, Pi Mu Epsilon, and Sigma Tau. He was very action in the IRE PGEC, serving as Chairman, in 1958-1959. He was a member of the IRE Technical Committee 8 on Computers beginning in 1951, and served as the IRE representative to the National Joint Computer Committee (1959-1961). In 1958, he served as Chairman of the Western Joint Computer Conference. The following year (1959) he was a member of an eight-man delegation of American scientists who visited the U.S.S.R. to discuss computers and related matters. In 1961, Ware was elected first Chairman of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies. In addition, he received the Achievement Award of the Los Angeles Section of the IRE in 1957.
