Andrei Ershov
First programmer in the Academy; Alpha/Beta compilers, mixed computation, school informatics
Timeline - Ershov in the record
7 referenced events from the Ternary Dreams archive.
Andrei Ershov is born in Moscow; his father is a chemical engineer, his mother a librarian.
Ershov finishes Moscow University's mech-math faculty in the USSR's first class of university-educated programmers, a student of Sobolev and of Lyapunov, who began teaching the fundamentals of programming in 1952-53.
Presenting Soviet work on automatic programming at England's National Physical Laboratory, Ershov reportedly meets John McCarthy, the beginning of a lifelong transatlantic friendship and collaboration.
The division of Europe becomes concrete. The bloc borders also seal off scientists from each other, making contacts like Ershov-McCarthy a rarity.
Ershov becomes the first programmer elected corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences; full membership follows in 1984.
Ershov, who had coined the slogan 'programming is the second literacy' in his Lausanne lecture of 1981, is a driving force in school informatics as 'Fundamentals of Informatics and Computing' becomes a nationwide school subject.
Novosibirsk's Institute of Informatics Systems is later named for him and keeps his memorial archive of thousands of letters and papers.
The research file for this dossier holds 7 verified source entries, 7 of them distinct works. The sources page lists every one of them with what it covers, how it was reached, and the sharpest point at which this page and its sources come apart.