Edward Fredkin

Edward Fredkin was an American computer scientist and physicist, recruited to a full MIT professorship in 1968 by Marvin Minsky despite never completing a college degree, who became an early pioneer of digital physics, the idea that physical processes can be understood as forms of computation. He invented the Fredkin gate, a reversible logic gate important to the theory of reversible and quantum computing, proposed the billiard ball model of computation, and introduced the trie data structure for storing and searching text. He directed MITs Project MAC, later renamed the Laboratory for Computer Science, from 1971 to 1974.