Alice Burks

She began her undergraduate degree at Oberlin College on a competitive mathematics scholarship and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where she completed her B.A.

Burks retired from full-time employment after marrying Moore School lecturer Dr. Arthur Burks, a mathematician who served as one of the principal engineers in the construction of the ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose electronic digital computer, built at the Moore School between 1943 and 1946.

Starting in the 1970s following the decision of Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, the federal court case that invalidated the ENIAC patent, she and husband Arthur championed the work of John Vincent Atanasoff, the Iowa State College physics professor whom the court had ruled invented the first electronic digital computer (a machine that came to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer) and from whom the subject matter of the ENIAC was ruled to be derived.

In articles and two books, the first co-authored with Arthur, Mrs. Burks sought to bolster the judge's decision and highlight testimony and evidence from the case.

This pitted the Burkses in a deeply acrimonious controversy against exponents of ENIAC inventors John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.