Yoshio Shimamoto was a nuclear physicist who also did work in mathematics and computer science. While at

Brookhaven National Laboratory Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratories, United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, New York, a hamlet of the Brookhaven, New York, Town of Brookhaven. It w ...

(1954-1987), he designed the logic for the MERLIN digital computer in 1958, and served as chairman of the Applied Mathematics Department from 1964 to 1975. Shimamoto researched in combinatorial mathematics, the economics of outer continental shelf oil and gas lease sales (on behalf of the U.S. Geological Survey), the architecture of supercomputers, and the linking of computers for parallel processing. During the 1970s, he worked with

Heinrich Heesch Heinrich Heesch (June 25, 1906 – July 26, 1995) was a German mathematician. He was born in Kiel and died in Hanover. In Göttingen, he worked on Group theory. In 1933, Heesch witnessed the National Socialist purges of university staff. Not ...

and

Karl Durre Karl may refer to: People * Karl (given name), including a list of people and characters with the name * Karl der Große, commonly known in English as Charlemagne * Karl of Austria, last Austrian Emperor * Karl (footballer) (born 1993), Karl Cac ...

on methods for a computer-aided proof of the

four color theorem In mathematics, the four color theorem, or the four color map theorem, states that no more than four colors are required to color the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. ''Adjacent'' means that two regions shar ...

, using computer programs to apply Heesch's notion of "discharging" to eliminate 4-colorable cases. A proof of the Four Color Theorem, which he presented in 1971, was later shown to be flawed, but it served as the basis for further work. Born in Hawaii in 1924, Shimamoto served with the

U.S. Army Signal Corps The United States Army Signal Corps (USASC) is a branch of the United States Army responsible for creating and managing communications and information systems for the command and control of combined arms forces. It was established in 1860 by ...

and

Strategic Bombing Survey The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) was a written report created by a board of experts assembled to produce an impartial assessment of the effects of the Anglo-American strategic bombing of Nazi Germany during the European theatre ...

in Japan, during World War II. He died in New Jersey on August 27, 2009.

References

2009 deaths American mathematicians Nuclear physicists Brookhaven National Laboratory staff {{academic-stub