Charles Hamblin

Charles Leonard Hamblin (20 November 1922 to 14 May 1985) was an Australian philosopher, logician and computer pioneer, born in Petersham, New South Wales, and a professor of philosophy at the New South Wales University of Technology, later the University of New South Wales. Working in the mid-1950s with the English Electric DEUCE, one of Australia's earliest computers, he introduced Reverse Polish Notation for writing arithmetic expressions without parentheses and, in 1957, one of the first uses of a push-down stack to evaluate them. For the DEUCE he designed GEORGE, one of the first programming languages, built around Reverse Polish Notation, an approach that went on to influence English Electric's KDF9 and later stack-architecture computers. In philosophy he is separately known for his book Fallacies, a standard work on faulty argument.