Pearcey, Trevor

Positions summary

Head of Caulfield Institute of Technology department of Electronic Data Processing, 1972-1979; Dean of School of Computing and Information Systems, 1980-1984

Biography

Trevor Pearcey was born on the 5th March 1919, in the United Kingdom. He graduated in 1940 from Imperial College with a Bachelor of Science and ARCS Physics and Mathematics. He terminated his PhD studies because of the war and joined the Air Defence Research Development Establishment. He came to Australia in 1945 to work at the Radiophysics Division of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). In 1948 he, with Maston Beard, commenced the design of a stored program electronic computer - the CSIR Mark I. The MkI was transferred to the University of Melbourne in 1955 and renamed CSIRAC. The CSIRAC was the first computer in an Australian University, and the first in Victoria, it still exists intact, making it the oldest surviving electronic computer in the world. Pearcey was the original architect of the CSIRO computing facility of the 1960s, leading to the establishment of the CSIRO Division of Computing Research and the nationwide CSIRONET system. From 1961 - 1963 Pearcey was the Vice Chairman of the Victorian Computer Society VCS (later Victorian Branch of Australian Computer Society ACS). He was President of ACS from 1967-68. Pearcey was appointed Head of Caulfield Institute of Technology Department of Electronic Data Processing (1972-1979), and later Dean of the School of Computing and Information Systems (1980-1984). His interests included work in radio propagation, physical optics, scheduling of air traffic, crystallography, viscous flow and classes of non-linear systems that exhibit what is now referred to as chaos. His collected works for the D.Sc. awarded to him by the University of Melbourne in 1971, comprise three volumes totalling almost 1800 pages.

Papers

Collected works 1940-1971
Works collected for the D.Sc. awarded by the University of Melbourne (1971), comprising three volumes totalling almost 1800 pages.

See also
The Pearcey Foundation

Encyclopedia of Australian Science: Pearcey, Trevor