Father of the ATM: India formula

It has been so easy to move to the market without money and credit card in your pocket and still do the shopping of your choice. The statement may sound strange but it is true when you have an ATM card in your pocket.

Before 1967 when people used to buy chocolates from the vending machines a man thought that will it be possible to get money on the similar basis. The thought was a revolution.

On fine day when John Shepherd-Barron reached his bank, bit late, he was not given the money and this insult made him to work on the Automated Teller Machine, now known as ATM.

John Adrian Shepherd-Barron was a Scottish inventor was born on 23 June 1925 in Shillong, Assam (now in Meghalaya) India. His father Wilfred Shepherd-Barron was the chief engineer of the Chittagong Port Commissioners. He was promoted to be the chairman of the Port of London Authority and then became the President of the Institute of Civil Engineers. His mother Dorothy was an Olympic tennis player and champion of the Wimbledon Ladies doubles segment.

He completed his early education from Stowe School and then joined University of Edinburgh and Trinity College, Cambridge. During World War II, he was commissioned into the Airborne Forces and served the 159^th Parachute Light Regiment.

He joined Da La Rue Instruments in 1960s and this was the time he came up with the concept of the money dispensing machine. The first machine of this kind was installed outside Enfield, north London, branch of Barclay’s Bank on June 27. 1967.

The Shepherd-Barron dispenser actually predated the introduction of the plastic card with its magnetic strip: the machines used special cheques which had been impregnated with a radioactive compound of carbon-14, which was detected and matched against the personal identification number (PIN) entered on a keypad. A proposed PIN length of 6 digits was rejected and 4 digits chosen instead, because it was the longest string of numbers that his wife could remember.

The four digit pin was finalized when Shepherd-Barron asked his wife to by heart his army code number which was of six digits. When he asked her to recall the number she could remember only the four digits and the two were out of her memory, this made him to finalise the pin of the ATM to be in four digits which every person can remember easily.

He is survived by his son Nicholas Shepherd-Barron FRS, who is professor of Algebraic Geometry at the University of Cambridge. John Adrian Shepherd-Barron died on 15^th May 2010 at the age of 84 in Raigmore Hospital, Inverness, Scotland.

It is also said that there is a link between ATM and Srinivas Ramanujan—A mathematical genius of India. When you put your debit or credit card in the machine and order the machine to dispense the amount of your desire the machine divides and arranges your money before dispensing it, using Ramanujan’s partition theory, which is as:

A partition of a positive integer n is just an expression for n as a sum of positive integers, regardless of order. Thus p(4) = 5 because 4 can be written as 1+1+1+1, 1+1+2, 2+2, 1+3, or 4. The problem of finding p(n) was studied by Euler, who found a formula for the generating function of p(n) (that is, for the infinite series whose nth term is p(n)xn). While this allows one to calculate p(n) recursively, it doesn't lead to an explicit formula. Hardy and Ramanujan came up with such a formula (though they only proved it works asymptotically; Rademacher proved it gives the exact value of p(n))

But this is a topic which we think someone will prove some day but for me it is something very important that one of the India brain has given the world a formula which is being used around the globe. (by N Naqvi)