Beatrice Worsley

Beatrice "Trixie" Helen Worsley (born October 18, 1921 in Querétaro , Mexico ; died May 8, 1972 in Waterloo (Ontario) , Canada ) was the first female computer scientist in Canada. She received her PhD from Cambridge University , with Alan Turing and Douglas Hartree as advisors. Her doctorate was the first in what would be called computer science today. She wrote the first program running on EDSAC , co-wrote the first compiler for Toronto's Ferranti Mark I., wrote numerous articles in computer science and taught computers and engineering at Queen's University and the University of Toronto for over 20 years before dying prematurely at the age of 50.

Early life

Beatrice Worsley was born on October 18, 1921 to Joel and Beatrice Marie (nee Trinker). Worsley's father, Joel, was born into a working class family in Ashton-under-Lyne , Manchester , in 1887 . Her grandparents had opened a textile factory in Xia, Mexico, in the 1850s, and her parents moved into it with her in 1908. The plant was destroyed by rebels around 1917 and her father took a job in El Salto at the CIMSA mills of the Rio Grande Group, where he later rose to become General Manager.

In 1920 Beatrice Marie had a son, Charles Robert, and their daughter, Beatrice Helen, was born the following year. Both children were homeschooled for safety reasons and had little interaction with their neighbors. The family moved to Toronto to give the children a better education. Charles attended Upper Canada College , while Beatrice Helen first attended Brown Public School and then from 1935 the Bishop Strachan School .

The Bishop Strachan School offered two tracks, and Beatrice enrolled in the more difficult university prep courses . She was so good that the headmaster named her one of the best students to attend school. She graduated with prizes in mathematics and natural sciences in 1939 and received the Governor General's Prize for the best overall grade.

Undergraduate degree

Worsley won the Burnside Scholarship in Science from Trinity College, University of Toronto, and began studying in September 1939. Her top grades earned her the first Alexander T. Fulton scholarship for natural sciences.

For her second year she switched to the department of mathematics and physics, to an applied instead of theoretical study program. In her third year, Worsley won the James Scott Scholarship in Mathematics and Physics. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and physics in 1944 and received the top grade in every class every year.

Military service

Immediately after graduating, Worsley joined the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service (WRCNS or "Wrens", German for example: Royal Canadian Women's Naval Service ). After basic training at HMCS Conestoga in Galt (now Cambridge, Ontario), she was assigned to Defense Research and Development Canada, Atlantic Research Center (NRE) in Halifax. She was assigned first to study port defense, then demagnetization and torpedo guidance.

When World War II ended, Worsley was the only "Wren" on the NRE who decided to stay on duty. In September 1945 she was promoted to lieutenant and carried out a new research project on hull corrosion. The following year she spent 150 days at sea, many of them on the NRE's Bangor class minesweeper "HMCS Quinte", setting a record for Wrens that still exists today. Most of what she herself describes as a “man's job” took place in the dire conditions of the Canadian Atlantic winter, which earned her the respect of the crew. She was officially demobilized in August 1946 .

Post-graduate at MIT

Immediately after leaving the Wrens, Worsley was accepted into MIT 's year-long Masters in Mathematics and Physics . Her courses included a course in solid state physics taught by László Tisza and a course on feedback amplifiers and servomechanisms, areas in which MIT was a world leader.

She completed her thesis A Mathematical Survey of Computing Devices with an Appendix on Error Analysis of Differential Analyzers under the direction of Henry Wallman , a member of the MIT Radiation Laboratory . The work covered almost every calculating machine that existed at the time. Among the many machines discussed were the Harvard Mark I and Mark II , several mechanical and electromechanical calculating machines from IBM , the relay-based digital computers from Bell Labs , ENIAC , EDVAC , the IAS computer , Whirlwind I and II, and EDSAC . The appendix dealt with a number of differential analyzer systems and examined their sources of error. Her work is one of the most detailed accounts of early computers to date.

Computation Center in Toronto

After Worsley finished her PhD, she returned to Canada and told her family that the future was in computers. Unfortunately, there was no computer industry in Canada at the time, and she accepted a position at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) where she worked in the aerodynamics department.

During this time, the University of Toronto planned to open a computer department, both as a research facility at the university and as a service bureau, to temporarily rent the machines to commercial and government users. In September 1947, the NRC provided the first funds to acquire two mechanical punch card computers from IBM and two assistants for operation. When Worsley heard about this, she applied for the position after having worked in the aerodynamics department of the NRC for just a few months. She joined the new department in January 1948.

One of their first jobs was a contract to help Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) use computers; she worked with Calvin Gotlieb and J. Perham Stanley. In the summer of 1948 she built a differential analyzer from Meccano parts, similar to the one described by Hartree and Arthur Porter in 1935. Little information is available about this analyzer. A second model, possibly also a conversion of the original, was made by students in 1951.

Cambridge and PhD

After the analyzer was completed, Worsley and Stanley were sent to the UK to learn about the EDSAC design that was under construction at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory (now: Computer Science Department). When they arrived, the machine was almost finished. They helped hook them up for the first test run on May 6, 1949. The first program that ran successfully on the machine was a program co-written by Worsley to calculate squares. In one of the earliest articles on the subject, The EDSAC Demonstration , she later collected this and a number of similar programs.

A meeting on computers was held in Cambridge the following month. To do this, Worsley created a report on the program for calculating squares and one for creating tables of prime numbers . The report included sample output and a description of the code and how it ran on the computer. This was printed in the conference proceedings and taken up years later by Brian Randell in his 1973 book The Origins of Digital Computers . This made Worsley known long after the events in their field.

Worsley then began her PhD at Newnham College . While working in the laboratory, she attended courses on quantum physics with Paul Dirac , John Lennard-Jones and Nicholas Kemmer , on number theory with Albert Ingham and courses on numerics with Douglas Hartree . She then began to write her dissertation under Hartree, who at the same time was supervising another Canadian woman with Charlotte Fischer .

During this work, Worsley returned to Toronto for unknown reasons and continued her dissertation at the University of Toronto with mathematics professor Byron Griffith . Shortly afterwards, in July 1951, she was reinstated at the Computation Center. In 1952, Worsley received his PhD from Hartree.

Her work, Serial Programming for Real and Idealized Digital Calculating Machines , is considered to be the first ever dissertation on modern computers. It contained a number of discussions on numerical calculations on Turing machines, as well as practical examples, particularly on EDSAC. Methods were then described with which it can be recognized which machine commands are required and which can be achieved by combinations of other commands. Both Alan Turing and Claude Shannon had discussed idealized versions of this concept, but Worsley's contribution was to show the most efficient way to do it, rather than a single generalized solution like Shannon's.

FERUT and Transcode

In the summer of 1948, the University of Toronto Computing Center approached the NRC with plans to build a copy of Bell Laboratories' Mark 6 relay-based digital computer . After getting preliminary approval, they turned to Northern Electric for drafts of the design. However, they were told there would be royalties of USD 25,000 (which is roughly USD 282,627 in 2018). In March 1949 they again asked the National Research Council (NRC) for an additional $ 50,000 for licensing and construction costs, but were instructed to drop these plans and build an electronic version instead.

The university and the NRC jointly planned an ambitious program to build a world-class computer to be used by the NRC, the Defense Research Board and industry. Construction of the University of Toronto Electronic Computer Mark I ( UTEC ) began in 1951 but quickly ran into serious problems due to the unreliability of their Williams tube storage systems. It wasn't until the end of 1951 that the system was finally sufficiently reliable. At this point, the Computing Center turned to the NCR for funding for a parallel processing unit to complete the system.

The Atomic Energy of Canada Limited was increasingly frustrated at the lack of useful machine and when they learned that the NRC had been activated because of the development of UTEC, they advised that the funds would be better spent on the purchase of a complete machine. AECL's Bennett Lewis knew that Ferranti had built a complete Ferranti Mark I machine for the AECL's British counterpart, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), but it had never been delivered due to the lack of funding from the new government . This Mark I was available for only $ 30,000, roughly the first installment of funding required for the expanded UTEC. The machine was purchased in early 1952 and arrived in early 1952, shortly before Worsley rejoined the Computing Center. She was aware of the arrival of the machine and named it FERUT for "Ferranti Electronic Computer at the University of Toronto". In the summer of that year, the machine was ready for use, making the University of Toronto one of the most powerful computers in the world.

In the fall of 1953, Worsley and JN Patterson Hume began developing a new computer language for the machine called Transcode. This language was similar to the Autocode language developed by Alick Glennie at the University of Manchester for the same machine, but took advantage of several of the Mark I design hints to create a faster and slightly easier-to-use language. A major benefit was the switch from decimal to binary and back, which allowed programmers to enter numbers in decimal form.

Queen's University

Despite impressive references from Cambridge, a number of respected publications, and several industry firsts, Worsley has been repeatedly passed over in University of Toronto promotions. It was not until 1960 that she was promoted to assistant professor , which roughly corresponds to a junior professorship, and it was not until 1964 that she was promoted to assistant professor for physics and computer science. Compared to other members of the early days of the Computation Center, she received far less recognition.

In 1965 Worsley was offered a position at Queen's University in Kingston, where a new data center based on an IBM 1620 was set up in 1967 . At Queen's, her job was more teaching and took up most of her time until 1971. From September 1971, after 20 years of activity, she completed a sabbatical year at the Institute for Applied Analysis and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo . On May 8, 1972, Worsley suffered a fatal heart attack in Waterloo.

Honors

In 2014, Worsley was posthumously awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science by the Canadian Association for Computer Science.

Remarks

1. ↑ The bases of the Canadian Navy are assigned ship-like names.
2. ↑ The IBM 1620 was replaced by an IBM 360/40 in 1967 .

literature

• Scott Campbell: Beatrice Helen Worsley: Canada's Female Computer Pioneer . In: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing . tape 25 , no. 4 , 2003, ISSN  1058-6180 , p. 51–62 , doi : 10.1109 / MAHC.2003.1253890 ( utoronto.ca [PDF; accessed October 20, 2019]).
• Brian Randell: The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers . 2nd Edition. Springer, 1975, ISBN 978-0-387-07114-5 .
• Michael Williams: UTEC and Ferut: The University of Toronto's Computation Center . In: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing . tape 16 , no. 2 , 1994, ISSN  1058-6180 , pp. 4-12 , doi : 10.1109 / 85.279226 .
• Statutes and Ordinances of the University of Cambridge 2007 . Cambridge University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-521-70692-0 , pp. 806 .
• Keith Smillie: Beatrice (Trixie) Worsley. In: The Computer and Me - A Restrospective Look at Some Computers and Languages. 2002, accessed October 16, 2019 . 
• Archives: Beatrice Worsley Fund, CA ON00239, F01390. Beatrice Worsley Fund. Queen's University Archives. 1951-1972. link

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jonathan P. Bowen: The Impact of Alan Turing: Formal Methods and Beyond . In: Jonathan P. Bowen, Zhiming Liu, Zili Zhang (Eds.): Engineering Trustworthy Software Systems. SETSS 2018 (=  Lecture Notes in Computer Science ). tape 11430 . Springer, Cham 2019, p. 202-235 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-030-17601-3_5 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z} Scott Campbell: Beatrice Helen Worsley: Canada's Female Computer Pioneer . In: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing . tape 25 , no. 4 , 2003, ISSN  1058-6180 , p. 51–62 , doi : 10.1109 / MAHC.2003.1253890 ( utoronto.ca [PDF; accessed October 20, 2019]).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Michael Williams: UTEC and Ferut: The University of Toronto's Computation Center . In: IEEE Annals of the History of Computing . tape 16 , no. 2 , 1994, ISSN  1058-6180 , pp. 4-12 , doi : 10.1109 / 85.279226 .
4. ^ ^{A b} Brian Randell: The EDSAC Demonstration . In: The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers . 2nd Edition. Springer, 1975, ISBN 978-0-387-07114-5 , pp. 395-401 .
5. ↑ Chris Bateman: The story behind the first computer in Canada. In: spacing.ca. November 12, 2016, accessed October 20, 2019 . 
6. ↑ JN Patterson Hume, Beatrice Worsley: Transcode: A system of automatic coding for FERUT . In: Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery . tape 2 , no. 4 , 1955, pp. 243-252 , doi : 10.1145 / 320809.320811 .
7. ↑ Lifetime Achievement Award 2014: Beatrice H. (Trixie) Worsley. In: Canadian Association of Computer Science. 2014, accessed October 20, 2019 .