Wikipedia:Today's featured article/March 11, 2015

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) was an American engineer, inventor, science administrator, policymaker and public intellectual. He is best known for his work on analog computers, for founding Raytheon, and for the memex, a proposed adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to hypertext. He became Vice President of MIT and Dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932, and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1938. He was chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). During World War II he was director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), coordinating the defense activities of some 6,000 leading American scientists. As head of NDRC and OSRD, he initiated the Manhattan Project, and ensured that it received top priority from the highest levels of government. In 1945, he published As We May Think in which he predicted that "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them". This influenced generations of computer scientists, who drew inspiration from his vision. (Full article...)