https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/29/kathleen_booth_obit/
"Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing
pioneers, has died. She was 100.
Kathleen Hylda Valerie Britten was born in Worcestershire, England, on July 9,
1922. During the Second World War, she studied at Royal Holloway, University of
London, where she got a BSc in mathematics in 1944. After graduating, she
became a junior scientific officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, a
research organization in Farnborough. Two years later she moved to Birkbeck
College, first as a research assistant, and later a lecturer and then research
fellow.
She also worked at the British Rubber Producers' Research Association (BRPRA),
where she met and worked with mathematician and physicist Andrew Donald Booth,
who later became her husband. After studying with X-ray crystallographer
Professor J D Bernal – inventor of the Bernal Sphere – A D Booth was working
out crystal structures using X-ray diffraction data, and finding the manual
calculations very tedious; he built an analog computer to automate part of
this.
In 1946, Britten and Booth collaborated at Birkbeck on a very early digital
computer, the Automatic Relay Calculator (ARC), and in doing so founded what is
now Birkbeck's Department of Computer Science and Information Systems."
Via Danie and Susan ****
RIP,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
