Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Electrical Engineering Alumnus Recognized for Calling Attention to Iowa State’s Place in Computing History

 

Contact:
Dana McCullough, communications specialist, 319-377-9839, ext. 317, schmidtdiastate.edu

Ames, Iowa – Electrical engineering alumnus Richard “R. K.” Richards (BSEE ’43) returned to campus October 16 to receive Iowa State University’s Professional Achievement Citation in Engineering award for helping secure Iowa State’s place in computing history and impacting the computing field. Last spring, Richards also won a Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECpE) for his successes.

Richards, who worked in industry for only seven years and earned 28 U.S. patents before switching careers to become a farmer, says he was flabbergasted at winning the awards.

“I didn’t think what I had done was that fancy,” Richards says.

Richards was a pioneer in computer arithmetic, the electronic processing of numbers. He wrote the first textbook on computer arithmetic, a subject that scholars considered “chaotic” at the time. The book was reprinted 10 times, educating a generation of engineers on an innovative subject.

Richards also wrote four other books, including one called Electronic Digital Systems, which played a pivotal role in a 1972 court case involving Honeywell and Sperry-Rand that determined who invented the world’s first electronic digital computer. Richard’s statement that “the ancestry of all electronic digital systems appear to be traceable to … the Atanasoff-Berry Computer” helped to validate the claim that Iowa State University’s John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics, and Clifford Berry, an electrical engineering graduate student, invented the first digital computer. The court decision brought important recognition to Iowa State.

“At the time, I was aware of an argument about who invented radio. I wanted to settle the argument before it started on who invented the computer,” Richards says. “The main reason for the books was to call attention to the Atanasoff computer. ISU is appreciative that I called attention to it.”

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