John Bennett

John Makepeace Bennett (31 July 1921 to 9 December 2010) was an Australian computer scientist born in Warwick, Queensland, and Australia's first professor of computer science. After serving in the Royal Australian Air Force from 1942 to 1946 and studying engineering and mathematics at the University of Queensland, he became in 1947 the first research student assigned to Maurice Wilkes at the Cambridge University Mathematical Laboratory, where he helped build the EDSAC computer, designing and testing its main control unit and bootstrap, and using it to carry out what is considered the first structural engineering calculation performed on a computer as part of his own doctorate. He moved to Ferranti in Manchester in 1950 to work on the Ferranti Mark 1*, then returned to Australia in 1956 to lead the University of Sydney's Basser Laboratory, the country's first computer science department, where his team programmed and operated the SILLIAC computer. He served as the founding president of the Australian Computer Society from 1966 to 1967.