Short answers, pulled from the story.
Edward Fredkin was an American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman born on the 2nd of October, 1934. He is known for pioneering digital physics, inventing the trie data structure and the Fredkin gate, designing the first modern computer interrupt system, and developing Digital Philosophy, which holds that physical reality is fundamentally computational.
Fredkin never graduated from college. He quit Caltech partway through his sophomore year. Despite this, Marvin Minsky recruited him to MIT as a full professor in 1968, and Caltech noted he had been admitted with the worst high school grades they had ever seen.
The Fredkin gate is a reversible logic gate, meaning computations performed with it can be run in reverse to recover original inputs without losing information. It is considered the essential breakthrough in reversible computing, building on ideas that Konrad Zuse had outlined in his 1969 book "Calculating Space".
Digital Philosophy is Fredkin's version of pancomputationalism, the view that all physical processes are forms of computation or information processing at the most fundamental level of reality. Fredkin articulated it in papers including "Introduction to Digital Philosophy", "Finite Nature", and "Digital Mechanics".
Fredkin founded Information International, Inc. in 1962, which developed high-precision film-to-digital scanners and became publicly traded. He also founded Three Rivers Computer Corporation, New England Television Corporation (owner of Boston's CBS affiliate WNEV on channel 7), and The Reliable Water Company, a manufacturer of advanced sea water desalination plants.
Edward Fredkin died on the 13th of June, 2023, in Brookline, Massachusetts, at the age of 88.