Ruth A. Weiss is a British-American

software engineer Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ''p ...

known for her work in

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

, especially the

hidden-line removal In 3D computer graphics, Solid geometry, solid objects are usually modeled by polyhedra. A face of a polyhedron is a planar polygon bounded by straight line segments, called Edge (geometry), edges. Curved surfaces are Computer representation of s ...

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 ...

, the L2 programming language, a floating-point mathematical package for the IBM 650.

Early life

Weiss was born in

Willesden Willesden () is an area of northwest London, situated 5 miles (8 km) northwest of Charing Cross. It is historically a parish in the county of Middlesex that was incorporated as the Municipal Borough of Willesden in 1933, and has forme ...

, 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 in the ceremonial county of Hampshire in southern England. It is located approximately south-west of London and west of Portsmouth. The city forms part of the South Hampshire built-up area, which also covers Po ...

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, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...

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 IBM 650 was replaced by the IBM 704 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 ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

. 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 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 of the IBM 700/7000 se ...

describes

in curved surfaces, a challenging problem at the time. This paper was acknowledged by inclusion in a 1998 compilation by SIGGRAPH 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 Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subje ...

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 Women computer scientists 1945 births Living people