Mario Tchou

Mario Tchou (simplified Chinese: 马里奥·朱; traditional Chinese: 馬里奧·朱; 1924–1961), also known as Tchou Wang Li, was an Italian engineer of Chinese descent. He was a pioneer of computer science in Italy, who led a group of scientists from the University of Pisa to invent in 1959 the Olivetti Elea—the world's most powerful computer at the time.

Biography

Born in Rome on 26 June 1924, he was the son of Evelyn Wang and the diplomat Yin Tchou, who worked within the Consulate of the Republic of China at the Holy See.

After obtaining his classical high school diploma at the Torquato Tasso Gymnasium High School in Rome, he undertook his studies in electrical engineering in Rome, at the La Sapienza University, and continued them with a scholarship in the United States, where, in 1947, he obtained a Bachelor of electrical engineering at the Catholic University of America in Washington. He graduated from the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering in 1949.

Having moved to New York, he began teaching at Manhattan College while, at the same time, he specialized at the Polytechnic University of New York in Brooklyn, where, in 1949, he obtained a Master of Science with a thesis entitled Ultrasonic Diffraction. In the same year he married the Italian Mariangela Siracusa. In 1952, at the age of 28, he was called to teach at Columbia University in New York, in the department led by John R. Ragazzini.

After the separation from his first wife, he married the artist Elisa Montessori in 1955, and they had two daughters.