Arthur Butz

Arthur R. Butz (born 1933) is an associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University and a Holocaust denier, best known as the author of the pseudohistorical book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. He achieved tenure in 1974 and currently teaches classes in control system theory and digital signal processing.

Education and career Born in 1933, His 111-page doctoral dissertation, "Perceptron type learning algorithms in non-separable situations," considered a problem in control engineering - an abridged version was published as an article two years later in Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications.

Publications Butz invented the algorithm which bears his name and was published in 1969. It provided a means for computing Hilbert's space-filling curve. This algorithm greatly advanced certain computer search techniques and has several other applications. It is used to this day. Butz is the author of numerous technical papers.

Holocaust denial In 1976, after he received tenure, Butz published The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry, an antisemitic, pseudohistorical book which argues that the Holocaust was a propaganda hoax. From 1980 to 2001, Butz was on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Review, a publication of the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust-denying organization.

Faculty reaction Butz's Holocaust denial sparked an outrage among the Northwestern University's faculty and community, after the existence of the book was disclosed by The Daily Northwestern in 1977. His views were also criticized by Robert H. Strotz, Northwestern University's president at the time of the book's publication. In 1997, Butz drew further criticism after using the university's Internet domain to publish his views.

In 2006, sixty of Butz's colleagues from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty signed a censure describing Butz's Holocaust denial as "an affront to our humanity and our standards as scholars". The letter also called for Butz to "leave our Department and our University and stop trading on our reputation for academic excellence." Instead, after the book's existence had been disclosed in 1977, the university began hosting symposia and developing courses on the Holocaust, created an endowed professorship on the subject, and funded a political science fellowship dedicated to study of the Holocaust. Northwestern has a policy applying only to Butz: if he teaches a course which is required for graduation or any degree program, another section of that course must be offered at the same time so no student ever has to enroll in one of his classes.

Removal from Amazon In 2017, Amazon.com removed the book along with other Holocaust-denying books from its US and UK sites. The removal of the books from the platform was requested by the director of the Yad Vashem library, Robert Rozett, who sent an email directly to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.