Akira Nakashima (中嶋章 or 中島章, also written as ''Nakashima Akira'', ''Nakasima Akira'' or ''Nakajima Akira'', 5 January 1908 – 29 October 1970) was a Japanese

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

of the

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...

. He got a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the

Imperial University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

. Akira Nakashima independenly introduced

switching circuit theory Switching circuit theory is the mathematical study of the properties of networks of idealized switches. Such networks may be strictly combinational logic, in which their output state is only a function of the present state of their inputs; or may ...

in papers from 1934 to 1936, concurrent with Victor Shestakov and

Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and the man who laid the foundations of th ...

, laying the foundations for

digital circuit In theoretical computer science, a circuit is a model of computation in which input values proceed through a sequence of gates, each of which computes a function. Circuits of this kind provide a generalization of Boolean circuits and a mathematica ...

design, in

digital computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to automatically carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as ''programs'', wh ...

s and other areas of modern technology. However, Shannon's ideas were markedly different in approach and theoretical framework compared to the work of Nakashima, whose work was still based on the existent circuit theory of the time and took a grounded approach, whereas Shannon based his work on mathematics and was far more abstract, thereby breaking new ground and setting up an approach that now dominates modern electrical engineering.

References

1908 births 1970 deaths 20th-century Japanese engineers NEC people University of Tokyo alumni {{Japan-engineer-stub