[2] He started teaching at Columbia University in 1926, and earned his PhD from Yale in 1931 in astronomy under Professor Ernest William Brown (1866–1938).
[5] Around 1933, Eckert proposed interconnecting punched card tabulating machines from IBM located in Columbia's Rutherford Laboratory to perform more than simple statistical calculations.
In 1940, Eckert became director of the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. World War II had been raging in Europe for many months.
This demand helped inspire Eckert to automate the process of creating these tables, using punched card equipment.
Columbia Physics professor Dana P. Mitchell served in the Manhattan Project (developing the first nuclear weapons) at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Nicholas Metropolis and Richard Feynman organized a punched-card solution, proving its effectiveness for physics research.
Eckert understood the significance of his laboratory, keenly aware of the advantage of scientific calculations performed without human interventions for long stretches of computation.
In 1945, he hired Herb Grosch[13] and Llewellyn Thomas[14] as the next two IBM research scientists, who both made significant contributions.
Written with Rebecca Jones, Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory, Columbia University, International Business Machines.