Clarence L. "Ben" Coates

Clarence L. “Ben” Coates (born November 5, 1923, in Hastings, Nebraska) was an American computer scientist and engineer known for his work on waveform recognition devices, circuit gates and accumulators.

Coates joined the faculty at Purdue University in 1973 as head of the School of Electrical Engineering (now Electrical and Computer Engineering) where, for the next decade, he emphasized computer education and the development of computing facilities. He was a driving force behind the high performance computing and networking plan that led to the creation of the Engineering Computer Network (ECN) serving all of Purdue's engineering schools. He also initiated a degree program in computer engineering at Purdue. He returned to teaching in the computer field full-time in 1983 before retiring in 1988.

Coates earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas in 1944 and 1948. He received his doctorate from the University of Illinois in 1953. He taught electrical engineering and computer science at the universities of Illinois, Kansas and Texas and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before coming to Purdue. He directed the Electronics Research Center and supervised the engineering computer facilities at Texas and started a graduate program in information sciences. At Illinois, he directed the Coordinated Sciences Laboratory, an interdisciplinary lab focused on computers, information processing and electronics.

He was a research scientist at the General Electric Research Laboratory in New York from 1956–63 and held five patents involving waveform recognition devices, circuit gates and accumulators on computer chips. Coates served in the U.S. Navy from 1944-46. He was named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1974 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1980.

Coates died in Florida on October 25, 2000, at age 76. Purdue is naming its latest supercomputing cluster, scheduled to the built in 2009, after Coates, continuing a practice of naming the machines for prominent figures in the history of computing at the university, which began with Purdue's Steele cluster. Like Steele, Coates will be part of the DiaGrid distributed computing network. Coates will be operated by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the university's central information technology organization, and the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, ITaP's research and discovery arm.

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