1915-

American philosopher-logician who was among the principal designers of the ENIAC computer, built in 1945. While at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, Burks, John von Neumann, and Herman Goldstine produced one of the most influential reports on computers—Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument (1946). Burks's research group at the University of Michigan (1946-1985) worked on programming, automata theory, neural net simulation, and self-reproducing cellular systems. Burks later turned his attention to adaptive computation.