Arthur Walter Burks (October 13, 1915 – May 14, 2008) was an American mathematician who worked in the 1940s as a senior engineer on the project that contributed to the design of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.

[citation needed] When Mauchly and Eckert's proposed concept for an electronic digital computer was funded by the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory in June 1943, Burks was added to the design team.

Also during 1945 Burks assisted with the preliminary logical design of the EDVAC in meetings attended by Mauchly, Eckert, John von Neumann, and others.

[citation needed] In 1964 Burks was approached by attorney Sy Yuter and asked to join T. Kite Sharpless and Robert F. Shaw in litigation that would add their names as inventors to the ENIAC patent, which would allow them to profit from the sale of licenses to the premiere electronic digital computer apart from Sperry Rand, the company that owned the Eckert-Mauchly interest in the patent and was at that time seeking royalties from other computer manufacturers.

This endeavor was never successful; in the 1973 decision to Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, U.S. District Judge Earl R. Larson ruled—even as he invalidated the patent—that only Mauchly and Eckert had invented the ENIAC, and that Burks, Sharpless, and Shaw could not be added as inventors.

[citation needed] In the 1970s Burks began meeting with Bob Axelrod, Michael Cohen, and John Holland, researchers with interests in interdisciplinary approaches to studying complex adaptive systems.

Known as the BACH group (an acronym of their surnames), it came to include, among others, Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Hofstadter, evolutionary biologist William Hamilton, microbiologist Michael Savageau, mathematician Carl Simon and computer scientists Reiko Tanese, Melanie Mitchell and Rick Riolo.