Kathleen Booth

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kathleen Hylda Valerie Booth (born 1922 in Stourbridge ) is a British computer scientist. She wrote the first assembly language and designed the assembler and auto code for the first computer systems at Birkbeck College, University of London . She helped develop three different machines including ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator), SEC (Simple Electronic Computer) and APEXC .

Life

Kathleen Britten was born in Stourbridge , England. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the University of London in 1944 and a PhD in applied mathematics in 1950. In 1950 she married her colleague Andrew Donald Booth with whom they had two children.

Career

From 1946 to 1962 Kathleen Booth worked at Birkbeck College. In 1947 she traveled to the United States to work as a research assistant for Andrew Booth, where she met John von Neumann in Princeton. After returning to the UK, they jointly wrote General Considerations in the Design of an All Purpose Electronic Digital Computer , in which they described changes to the original ARC redesign of the ARC2 using a Von Neumann architecture. Part of their contribution was the ARC assembly language. She also built and maintained ARC components.

Kathleen and Andrew Booth's team in Birkbeck was considered the smallest of the early British computer groups. From 1947 to 1953 they produced three machines: ARC (Automatic Relay Computer), SEC (Simple Electronic Computer) and APEXC (All Purpose Electronic X-Ray Computer). You and Andrew Booth worked on the same team. He built the computers and she programmed them. This was considered remarkable given the size of the group and the limited resources available. Although APEXC ultimately led to the HEC (Hollerith Electronic Computer) series manufactured by the British Tabulating Machine Company , the Birkbeck Group did not end up at the forefront of UK computing because of its size.

Booth was a regular contributor to her work on the ARC and APEXC systems and co-authored Automatic Digital Calculators , published in 1953 , which exemplified the Planning and Coding programming style . Together with Andrew Booth and JC Jennings, she founded the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck Collect in 1957. In 1958 she taught a programming course there.

In 1958, Booth wrote one of the first books on programming an APEXC computer.

From 1944 to 1946 she was Junior Scientific Officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough . From 1946 to 1962, Booth was a research scientist at the British Rubber Producer's Research Association (today: Tun Abdul Razak Research Center) and from 1952 to 1962 she worked for ten years as a research assistant and lecturer at Birbeck College, University of London. She later worked in research and teaching at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada from 1962 to 1972 , where she was also an associate professor. From 1972 to 1978 she was Professor of Mathematics at Lakehead University in Canada.

Booth's research on neural networks resulted in successful programs that simulate how animals recognize patterns and characters. She and her husband suddenly left Birkbeck College in 1961 after their husband was not given a professorship despite his massive contributions. A Type 1400 ICT was donated to the Numerical Automation Department but was actually installed at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine .

bibliography

  • Andrew Donald Booth, Kathleen HV Britten: Principles and Progress in the Construction of High-Speed ​​Digital Computers . In: Quart. Journ. Mech. And Applied Math. Band 2 , no. 2 , September 1, 1947, p. 182-197 , doi : 10.1093 / qjmam / 2.2.182 ( bobmackay.com ).
  • Murdoch (ed.): Coding system for the APE (X) C . AU ( edu.au ).
  • Andrew Booth, Kathleen Britten: Coding for ARC, Institute for Advanced Study . Princeton 1947.
  • Andrew Booth, Kathleen Britten: General considerations in the design of an all-purpose electronic digital computer . In: Institute for Advance Study . Princeton 1947.
  • Andrew Booth, Kathleen Britten: The accuracy of atomic co-ordinates derived from Fourier series in X-ray crystallography Part V . In: Proc. Roy. Soc. A 193, 1948, p. 305-310 .
  • Andrew Booth, Kathleen Booth: Automatic Digital Calculators . Ed .: Butterworth-Heinmann Academic Press. London 1953.
  • Kathleen Booth: Programming for an Automatic Digital Calculator . Ed .: Butterworths. London 1958.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Roger Johnson: 50 Years of Computing at Birkbeck. In: Birkbeck College, University of London. April 1, 2008, accessed August 3, 2019 .
  2. ↑ George Dyson: Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe . Ed .: Pantheon Books. 2012, ISBN 978-0-375-42277-5 , pp. xvii .
  3. ↑ Kathleen HV Booth: Machine language for Automatic Relay Computer . In: University of London (Ed.): Birkbeck College Computation Laboratory .
  4. ^ IT Honor Roll ( memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on August 3, 2019.
  5. ↑ a b c Dr. Kathleen Booth (nee Britten). In: IT History Society. December 21, 2015, accessed August 3, 2019 .
  6. ^ Simon Lavington: Alan Turing and His Contemporaries: Building the World's First Computers . 2012, ISBN 978-1-78017-105-0 .
  7. ^ About / History. In: Birkbeck School of Computing. Retrieved August 3, 2019 . .
  8. ↑ Kathleen Booth (nee Britten) at the ARC relay, parallel, AU which she constructed, Birkbeck school of Computing, 1948 ( memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on August 3, 2019.
  9. ↑ Simon Lavington: Early British computers: the story of vintage computers and the people who built them . Ed .: Manchester University Press. Manchester 1980, ISBN 978-0-7190-0803-0 , pp. 62 .
  10. ^ Martin Campbell-Kelly: The Birkbeck College Machines, The Development of Computer Programming in Britain (1945 to 1955) . In: IEEE (Ed.): Annals of the History of Computing . tape 4 , no. 2 , April 1, 1982, pp. 121-139 , doi : 10.1109 / MAHC.1982.10016 .
  11. ^ Cliff B Jones, John L Lloyd: Dependable and historic computing . Ed .: Springer-Verlag. Berlin 1998, ISBN 978-3-642-24540-4 , pp. 27 .
  12. ↑ Kathleen Booth: Programming for an Automatic Digital Calculator . Ed .: Butterworths. London 1958.
personal data
SURNAME Booth, Kathleen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Britten, Kathleen; Booth, Kathleen Hylda Valerie (full name); Booth, Kathleen HV
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British computer scientist and mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Stourbridge