Eiichi Goto

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The native form of this personal name is Gotō Eiichi. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.
Eiichi Goto
後藤 英一
Born(1931-01-26)January 26, 1931
Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan
DiedJune 12, 2005(2005-06-12) (aged 74)
Alma materUniversity of Tokyo
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
Institutions

Eiichi Goto (

general-purpose computers
in Japan.

Biography

Goto was born on January 26, 1931, in

RIKEN, a position he held until 1991.[1][2] However, he continued to hold a position at Tokyo University as well, becoming a full professor there in 1970. He retired from the University of Tokyo in 1990, and in 1991 he moved to Kanagawa University.[3]

Goto was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961.[1] He was vice president of the International Federation for Information Processing from 1971 to 1974,[1][2][4] and also served several times on the steering committee of the Information Processing Society of Japan.[1]

Goto died on June 12, 2005, of complications of diabetes.[1][2]

Research

In 1954 while he was still a graduate student, Goto invented the parametron, a circuit element that combined a ferrite core with a capacitor to generate electrical oscillations whose timing could be controlled.[1][5] This provided an alternative to the vacuum tube technology then in use for building computing devices. He completed the construction of the PC-1, one of the first general-purpose computers built in Japan, in 1958, using parametron-based logic.[1][6][7] Soon afterwards, he proposed the Goto pair, a device related to the parametron.

Josephson junctions to improve both the speed and the energy consumption of these devices.[1]

During his visit to MIT in 1961, Goto devised the first time-optimal solution to the firing squad synchronization problem, a problem of designing a cellular automaton in which all cells simultaneously fire, starting from an initial configuration with only one active cell.[8]

In

symbolic algebra systems to manipulate mathematical formulae. In order to implement these systems, Goto developed a new Lisp system called HLISP, in which he had introduced the innovative technique of hash consing to eliminate redundant memory usage by using a hash table to map duplicated values to the same position in memory.[1][2] Goto's work in symbolic computing also included the development of FLATS, a specialized computer hardware system aimed at this problem.[2][4]

Other topics in Goto's research included the search for

cathode ray tubes, arbitrary-precision arithmetic, and the automated analysis of bubble chamber experiments.[1][2][4]

Awards and honors

Goto was one of the winners of the Asahi Prize in 1959 for his work on the parametron and the PC-1.[9] He won the Okochi memorial Technology Prize [ja] in 1988, and in 1989 he was given the Purple Ribbon Medal of Honor by the Japanese government for his work on electron beam shaping.[3]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Wada and Soma (August 26, 2005), Japanese Computer Pioneers: Goto Eiichi 1931〜2005, IPSJ Computer Museum, retrieved 2011-09-05.
  2. ^
    S2CID 6281485, archived from the original
    (PDF) on 2011-09-29.
  3. ^
    doi:10.1109/12.272429
    .
  4. ^
    S2CID 675701
  5. ^
    ISBN 978-0-521-42492-9
    .
  6. ISBN 978-0-262-68137-7
    .
  7. S2CID 44975112
  8. doi:10.1016/S0019-9958(66)90110-0
    .
  9. ^ The Asahi Prize, retrieved 2011-09-05.
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