Hans Piloty

Hans Piloty (1894 to 1969) was a German electrical and communications engineer who, as professor at the Technical University of Munich, led the construction of an early German electronic computer. Born in Berlin into a Munich family of artists and scholars, he studied electrical engineering at the TH Munich, worked as a senior engineer at AEG Berlin, and took the chair of electrical measurement technology in Munich in 1931. He served as rector of the university from 1948 to 1951. Between 1952 and 1955 the Programmgesteuerte Elektronische Rechenanlage Muenchen, known as PERM, was built under his and the mathematician Robert Sauer's direction by a team that included his son Robert Piloty, Walter Proebster, Klaus Samelson and Friedrich L. Bauer. In 1962 he and Sauer founded the commission for electronic computing at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, which led to the Leibniz Computing Centre.