An Wang

An Wang (February 7, 1920 - March 24, 1990) was a Chinese-American computer engineer and inventor born in Shanghai, who earned a BS in electrical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1940 and immigrated to the United States in 1945 for graduate study at Harvard University, completing a PhD in applied physics in 1948. After working with Howard Aiken on the Mark IV computer, he founded his own engineering firm, Wang Laboratories, in June 1951, and made significant contributions to the development of magnetic core memory technology, selling his core memory patent to IBM in 1955 for 500,000 dollars. Wang Laboratories became a market leader in dedicated word processing systems through the 1970s and 1980s, and Wang died of cancer in Boston in 1990.