Ruth A. Weiss is a British-American

software engineer Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software applications. It involves applying engineering principles and computer programming expertise to develop ...

known for her work in

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. ...

, especially the

hidden-line removal In 3D computer graphics, solid objects are usually modeled by polyhedra. A face of a polyhedron is a planar polygon bounded by straight line segments, called edges. Curved surfaces are usually approximated by a polygon mesh. Computer programs ...

problem. She also developed, together with

Richard Hamming Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915 – January 7, 1998) was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Ha ...

, the L2 programming language, a

floating-point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a Sign (mathematics), signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some Radix, base) multiplied by an integer power of that ba ...

mathematical package for the

IBM 650 The IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data-Processing Machine is an early digital computer produced by IBM in the mid-1950s. It was the first mass-produced computer in the world. Almost 2,000 systems were produced, the last in 1962, and it was the firs ...

Early life

Weiss was born in

Willesden Willesden () is an area of north-west London, situated 5 miles (8 km) north-west of Charing Cross. It is historically a parish in the county of Middlesex that was incorporated as the Municipal Borough of Willesden in 1933; it has formed ...

, Middlesex, England (now part of the Greater London area) on March 30, 1945.Birth Registration, Willesden, Middlesex, England; General Register Office, Southport, England; Line 113, Vol. 3A She arrived in the United States on November 13, 1952, with her mother, Margaret Weiss (Marliese Oppá or Oppe), and her two brothers and maternal grandmother on the French ocean liner ''Ile de France'', which sailed from

Southampton Southampton is a port City status in the United Kingdom, city and unitary authority in Hampshire, England. It is located approximately southwest of London, west of Portsmouth, and southeast of Salisbury. Southampton had a population of 253, ...

on November 7, 1952.Immigration, New York City, New York, United States, NARA microfilm publication T715 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.) Her father, Paul Weiss, a noted British mathematician of German descent, had already arrived in the U.S. in September 1950 and was living in Syracuse, NY. Weiss was naturalized a U.S. citizen on April 28, 1964.Ruth Elizabeth Weiss, Naturalization Petition and Record, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, Detroit, Certificate No. 8637552, Issued April 28, 1964

Career and accomplishments

While working for

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

in the 1950s and 1960s, Weiss co-developed, with

, the L2 interpretive floating point package. The L2 system was widely used within Bell Labs, and also by outside users, who knew it as Bell 2. It was superseded by Fortran when the

was replaced by the

IBM 704 The IBM 704 is the model name of a large digital computer, digital mainframe computer introduced by IBM in 1954. Designed by John Backus and Gene Amdahl, it was the first mass-produced computer with hardware for floating-point arithmetic. The I ...

in 1957. At Bell Labs she also worked on development of the

Multics Multics ("MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service") is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory.Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", Communications of t ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

. Weiss's 1966 paperRuth A. Weiss
BE VISION, A Package of IBM 7090 FORTRAN Programs to Draw Orthographic Views of Combinations of Plane and Quadric Surfaces
' on her BE VISION software for the

IBM 7090 The IBM 7090 is a second-generation Transistor computer, transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computer that was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 is the fourth member o ...

describes

in curved surfaces, a challenging problem at the time. This paper was acknowledged by inclusion in a 1998 compilation by

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference centered around computer graphics organized by ACM, starting in 1974 in Boulder, CO. The main conference has always been held in North ...

of the seminal papers in computer graphics. According to Carlson, "Ruth Weiss created in 1964 (published in 1966) some of the first algorithms for converting equations of surfaces to orthographic views on an output device." In a 1966 paper, Ivan E. Sutherland stated that the problem of hidden-line removal remained unsolved for surfaces other than planes. Two months later, Weiss corrected him in a letterRuth A. Weiss. Letters. ''Datamation'', 12(8):12, 1966. to the same publication, citing her work in hidden-line removal in quadric surfaces.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Weiss, Ruth A. Programming language designers Computer graphics professionals British software engineers British women engineers British women computer scientists 1945 births Living people