Ida Rhodes

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Ida Rhodes at the NBS in May 1959

Ida Rhodes (born as Hadassah Itzkowitz on May 2 . Jul / 15. May  1900 greg. In the Ukraine ;. D 1. February 1986 in Rockville (Maryland) ) was a Ukrainian-American computer pioneer.

Life

Rhodes was in a Jewish village between Nemirov and Tulcin born in Ukraine (about 150 miles southwest of Kiev) and was patronized by the landowner and Countess, to which it belonged and in natural history teaching (the Countess was passionate botanist). In 1913 she came to the USA with her family. From 1919 she studied mathematics at Cornell University with a bachelor's and master's degree in 1923. She studied in evening classes while she worked as a nurse at night (physics and chemistry were therefore not considered as subjects because the laboratory classes were during the day). After that, she worked in various positions with numerical calculations. In 1930/31 she studied again at Columbia University . From 1940 she was with the Mathematical Tables Project in New York City, an extensive project for the tabulation of mathematical functions that had existed since 1938 as part of the New Deal's WPA job creation program , which lasted until 1948 (from it emerged the Abramowitz-Stegun , whose creation Rhodes was involved). There she worked for Gertrude Blanch , another mathematician involved was Irene Stegun . The project did not yet use electronic calculating machines, but punch card machines, human calculators, and desktop computers. She stayed with the project until 1947.

She worked as a computer pioneer after the war. From 1947 she was with the National Applied Mathematics Laboratories (NAML) of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Washington DC and played a key role in the development of the SEAC computer at the NBS and as a consultant on other projects, for which she received the gold medal of the Ministry of Commerce in 1949. When the Census Bureau received a UNIVAC I in 1951 , she implemented the assembly language C-10, which she had designed with Betty Holberton . She also wrote the original program that the United States Social Security Agency used. Rhodes retired from the NBS in 1964, but continued to work as a consultant to the National Bureau of Standards until 1971. She remained active, conducted extensive international correspondence, traveled extensively and was involved in Jewish institutions. In New York she also met Golda Meir, whom she invited to Israel, but she looked after her aging parents in New York.

She also wrote a widely used algorithm for the Jewish calendar.

In 1952 she published an optimistic version of a computer-dominated world (The Human Computer's Dreams of the Future). She was also one of the first to do foreign language translation using computers.

In addition to the gold medal from the Department of Commerce (1949), she received a Certificate of Appreciation from the Department of Commerce in 1976 and was honored as a UNIVAC 1 pioneer at the AFIPS National Computer Conference in Chicago in 1981.

literature

  • Gertrude Blanch, Ida Rhodes: Table Making at NBS, in: BK Scaife (Ed.), Studies in Numerical Analysis, Papers in Honor of Cornelius Lanczos, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, and Academic Press, New York, 1974, p. 1 –6.
  • Eric Weiss: Ida Rhodes, Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 14, 1992, pp. 58-59.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biography after JAN Lee, IEEE Computer Pioneers , 1995
  2. ↑ Rhodes, Computation of the Dates of the Hebrew New Year and Passover, Computers and Mathematics with Applications, Volume 3, 1977, pp. 193-196
personal data
SURNAME Rhodes, Ida
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Itzkowitz, Hadassah
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Ukrainian-American computer pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Ukraine
DATE OF DEATH February 1, 1986
Place of death Rockville, Maryland