FORRESTER, JAY WRIGHT

born July 14, 1918, Anselmo, Neb., U.S. U.S. electrical engineer and management expert who invented the random-access magnetic core memory, the information-storage device employed in most digital computers. Forrester was educated in electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, where he remained to teach and do research. In 1945 he founded the Digital Computer Laboratory there and participated in the construction of Whirlwind I, an early general-purpose digital computer. During the course of this work, he realized that the slow and unreliable information-storage systems of early digital computers hindered their further development. Forrester devised in 1949 a memory system that stored information in three dimensions; in his invention a magnetic cell was employed for both storage and switching. From 1951 until 1956, Forrester was associated with the Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Mass., operated by MIT for the federal government to apply electronic technology to problems of the national defense. Forrester was led to experiment with the application of computers to management problems. In time he devised the technique of computer simulation in which real-world relationships, such as the flow of materials in a factory, are represented as a series of interconnected mathematical equations that can be fed to the computer. As a professor in MIT's Sloan School of Management, from 1956, Forrester wrote Industrial Dynamics (1961), Principles of Systems (1968), Urban Dynamics (1969), and World Dynamics (1971). His Collected Papers appeared in 1975.