When J. Halcombe Laning Jr. arrived at MIT in 1938, he was ready to take the world by storm. Good thing. “I arrived in Boston on the afternoon of the Great New England Hurricane of 1938,” says Laning. “My trunks arrived a week later.”
A native of Kansas City, MO, Laning earned a bachelor’s in chemical engineering and then a PhD in applied mathematics. In 1945 he began working at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, which became Draper Laboratory; he retired from the lab in 1989. “In its early years, Draper was a very informal organization,” he says. “I was given a degree of freedom to follow my own nose, follow my own interests.”
His nose led him to the development of the first algebraic compiler, completed in 1953, which was used on MIT’s Whirlwind computer and became the forerunner to programming languages such as Fortran. Also in the 1950s, Laning’s work was instrumental in the development of the Q-guidance system used in the Thor and Polaris ballistic missiles. “I’ve always referred to myself as a professional dilettante,” he says. “Much of the work was done by others, but I supplied the basic concept, the basic equations.”
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