Franz Alt (mathematician)

Franz Leopold Alt (30 November 1910 to 21 July 2011) was an Austrian-born American mathematician who made major contributions to computer science in its early days. He is best known as one of the founders of the Association for Computing Machinery, which he served as its third president from 1950 to 1952, and as the first recipient of its Distinguished Service Award in 1970. Born in Vienna, he took a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Vienna in 1932 with Hans Hahn and Karl Menger as his principal teachers, and then worked on econometrics. He left Austria in 1938 and settled in New York. After army service he was placed in charge of planning for electronic computation at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1945. From 1948 he was deputy chief of the Computation Laboratory and later of the Applied Mathematics Division at the National Bureau of Standards, where he directed the early use of computers across the bureau and the federal government. His interest in machine translation led to the founding of the Association for Computational Linguistics.