Mary Kenneth Keller,
B.V.M. (December 17, 1913 – January 10, 1985) was an American
Catholic
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
religious sister
A religious sister (abbreviated ''Sr.'' or Sist.) in the Catholic Church is a woman who has taken public vows in a religious institute dedicated to apostolic works, as distinguished from a nun who lives a cloistered monastic life dedicated to p ...
, educator and pioneer in
computer science. She was the first person to earn a Ph.D. in computer science in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territo ...
. Keller and Irving C. Tang were the first two recipients of computer science doctorates (Keller's Ph.D. and Tang's D.Sc. were awarded on the same day).
Career
Keller was born in
Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...
, on December 17, 1913, to John Adam Keller and Catherine Josephine (née Sullivan) Keller.
She entered the
Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1932
and took her
vows
A vow ( Lat. ''votum'', vow, promise; see vote) is a promise or oath.
A vow is used as a promise, a promise solemn rather than casual.
Marriage vows
Marriage vows are binding promises each partner in a couple makes to the other during a weddin ...
with that
religious congregation
A religious congregation is a type of religious institute in the Catholic Church. They are legally distinguished from religious orders – the other major type of religious institute – in that members take simple vows, whereas members of religi ...
in 1940.
She completed both her
B.S. (Bachelor of Science) in Mathematics in 1943 and her
M.S. (Master of Science) in Mathematics and Physics in 1953 from
DePaul University
DePaul University is a private, Catholic research university in Chicago, Illinois. Founded by the Vincentians in 1898, the university takes its name from the 17th-century French priest Saint Vincent de Paul. In 1998, it became the largest Cat ...
in Chicago. Keller earned her
Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy) from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the ...
in 1965.
[, PhDs granted at UW-Madison Computer Sciences Department.] Her dissertation, ''Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns'',
focused on "constructing algorithms that performed analytic differentiation on algebraic expression, written in CDC FORTRAN 63."
Throughout Keller's graduate studies, she was affiliated with various institutions including the University of Michigan, Purdue, and Dartmouth. Many sources claim that Keller began working at the National Science Foundation workshop in 1958 in the computer science center at
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...
, a male-only institution at the time, where she participated in the implementation of the first DTSS
BASIC
BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College i ...
kernel for the language, working under
John G. Kemeny
John George Kemeny (born Kemény János György; May 31, 1926 – December 26, 1992) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator best known for co-developing the BASIC programming language in 1964 with Thomas E. ...
and
Thomas E. Kurtz
Thomas Eugene Kurtz (born February 22, 1928) is a retired Dartmouth professor of mathematics and computer scientist, who along with his colleague John G. Kemeny set in motion the then revolutionary concept of making computers as freely availab ...
along with about a dozen other students. But this cannot be correct since Dartmouth did not acquire its first computer until 1959. Keller in fact was at Dartmouth sometime in 1961
when
Dartmouth ALGOL 30
Dartmouth ALGOL 30 was a 1960s-era implementation, first of the ALGOL 58 programming language and then of ALGOL 60. It is named after the computer on which it ran: a Librascope General Precision (LGP-30) desk-size computer acquired by Dartmouth Co ...
was being developed and used in undergraduate education.
Keller believed in the potential for computers to increase access to information and promote education. After finishing her doctorate in 1965, Keller founded the computer science department at Clarke College (now
Clarke University), a Catholic women's college founded by
Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dubuque, Iowa. That same year, that National Science Foundation awarded her a grant of $25,000 payable over two years for "instructional equipment for undergraduate education." One of the first computer science departments at a small college, Keller directed this department for twenty years. Clarke College now has the Keller Computer Center and Information Services, which is named after her and which provides computing and telecommunication support to Clarke College students, faculty members, and staff. The college has also established the Mary Kenneth Keller Computer Science Scholarship in her honor.
Keller was an advocate for the involvement of women in computing
and the use of computers for education. She helped to establish the Association of Small Computer Users in Education (ASCUE).
She went on to write four books in the field. At the ACM/SIGUCC User Services Conference in 1975, Keller declared "we have not fully used a computer as the greatest interdisciplinary tool that has been invented to date."
Keller died on January 10, 1985, at the age of 71.
Bibliography
* (Doctoral Dissertation)
* ''Computer graphics and applications of matrix methods : three dimensional computer graphics and projections'' by Mary K Keller; Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (U.S.); Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications Project (U.S.) Lexington, MA : COMAP/UMAP, 1983. U106, U110.
* ''Electrical circuits and Applications of matrix methods : analysis of linear circuits'' Mary K Keller; Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (U.S.); Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications Project (U.S.), 1978. U108.
* ''Food service management and Applications of matrix methods : food service and dietary requirements'' by Mary K Keller; Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (U.S.); Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications Project (U.S.) Lexington, MA : COMAP/UMAP, 1983. U105, U109.
* ''Markov chains and applications of matrix methods : fixed point and absorbing Markov chains'' by Mary K Keller; Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (U.S.); Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications Project (U.S.) Lexington, MA : COMAP/UMAP, 1983. U107, U111.
See also
*
Timeline of women in science
This is a timeline of women in science, spanning from ancient history up to the 21st century. While the timeline primarily focuses on women involved with natural sciences such as astronomy, biology, chemistry and physics, it also includes women ...
*
BASIC (programming language)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Keller, Mary Kenneth
1913 births
1985 deaths
20th-century American Roman Catholic nuns
American women computer scientists
American computer scientists
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
DePaul University alumni
Clarke University faculty
People from Dubuque, Iowa
20th-century American women scientists
American computer programmers
Programming language designers
Software engineers
Catholics from Iowa
BASIC programming language