Beatrice Worsley
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Beatrice Helen Worsley (18 October 1921 – 8 May 1972) was a Canadian computer scientist, the first woman in the country to work in that profession. She received her Ph.D. from the
University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...
with
Maurice Wilkes Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes (26 June 1913 – 29 November 2010) was an English computer scientist who designed and helped build the EDSAC, Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored-program computers, and ...
as adviser, the first Ph.D. granted in what would today be known as
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...
. She wrote the first program to run on
EDSAC The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal ''First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'', the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the Universit ...
, co-wrote the first compiler for Toronto's Ferranti Mark 1, wrote numerous papers in computer science, and taught computers and engineering at Queen's University and the
University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...
for over 20 years before her death at the age of 50.


Early life

Beatrice was born on 18 October 1921 to Joel and Beatrice Marie (''nee'' Trinker). Joel was born in 1887 to a working-class family in
Ashton-Under-Lyne Ashton-under-Lyne is a market town in Tameside, Greater Manchester, England. The population was 48,604 at the 2021 census. Historic counties of England, Historically in Lancashire, it is on the north bank of the River Tame, Greater Manchester, ...
,
Manchester Manchester () is a city and the metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. It had an estimated population of in . Greater Manchester is the third-most populous metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, with a population of 2.92&nbs ...
. Beatrice Marie's grandparents had started a textile mill in Xia, Mexico, in the 1850s, and in 1908 Joel and Beatrice Marie moved to work at the plant. The plant was destroyed by rebels around 1917 and Joel took a job in El Salto with Rio Grande group's CIMSA mills, rising to become the general manager. Beatrice Marie gave birth to a son in 1920, Charles Robert, and then Beatrice Helen the next year. The two were homeschooled for security reasons, having little interaction with their neighbours. In 1929, Joel moved the family to
Toronto Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...
to provide better schooling for his children. Charles entered Upper Canada College, while Beatrice started at Brown Public School, but moved to Bishop Strachan School in 1935. Bishop Strachan offered two tracks, and Beatrice enrolled in the more difficult university prep courses. She excelled to the point that the headmaster stated she was one of the best students to attend the school. She graduated in 1939 with awards in maths, science, and for having the highest overall grade, earned the Governor General's Award.


Undergraduate studies

Worsley won the Burnside Scholarship in Science from Trinity College, part of the University of Toronto, and began studies in September 1939. Her high marks won her the first Alexander T. Fulton Scholarship in Science. For her second year she transferred to the Mathematics and Physics division, an applied program rather than theoretical. In her third year, Worsley won the James Scott Scholarship in Mathematics and Physics. Graduating in 1944 in mathematics and physics with a
Bachelor of Arts A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts deg ...
, she had the distinction of earning the highest mark in every class every year.


Wartime service

Immediately after graduation, Worsley enlisted in the
Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service The Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service (WRCNS or "Wrens") was an element of the Royal Canadian Navy that was active during the Second World War and post-war as part of the Canadian Forces Naval Reserve, Royal Canadian Naval Reserve until unificat ...
, better known as the "Wrens". After basic training at HMCS ''Conestoga'' in Galt (today known as
Cambridge, Ontario Cambridge is a city in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, located at the confluence of the Grand River (Ontario), Grand and Speed River, Speed rivers, in the central part of the Ontario Peninsula. The city had a population ...
), she was assigned to the Naval Research Establishment (NRE) in Halifax. She was first tasked with studying harbour defences, then degaussing, and torpedo guidance. When World War II ended, Worsley was the only Wren at the NRE to choose to remain in service. In September 1945 she was promoted to
lieutenant A lieutenant ( , ; abbreviated Lt., Lt, LT, Lieut and similar) is a Junior officer, junior commissioned officer rank in the armed forces of many nations, as well as fire services, emergency medical services, Security agency, security services ...
and put on a new research project on hull corrosion. Over the next year she spent 150 days at sea, many of them on the NRE's Bangor-class minesweeper, HMCS ''Quinte'', setting a record for Wrens that stands to this day. Most of this took place during the terrible conditions of the Canadian Atlantic winter, earning her the respect of the crew doing what she herself referred to as a "man's job". She was officially demobilized in August 1946.


Post-graduate at MIT

Immediately after leaving the Wrens, Worsley was accepted to
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...
's one-year master's program in mathematics and physics. Among her classes was a course in solid-state physics taught by László Tisza, and a course on feedback amplifiers and servomechanisms, an area in which MIT was a world leader. Her thesis on ''A Mathematical Survey of Computing Devices with an Appendix on Error Analysis of Differential Analyzers'' was completed under the direction of Henry Wallman, a member of the famed MIT Radiation Laboratory. The paper covered almost every computing machine then in existence. Among the many machines discussed were the Harvard Mark I and Mark II, several IBM mechanical and electromechanical calculating machines, Bell Labs' relay based digital computers,
ENIAC ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first Computer programming, programmable, Electronics, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was ...
,
EDVAC EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the earliest electronic computers. It was built by Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with ORDVAC, it was a successor to the ENIAC. ...
, the IAS machine, Whirlwind I and II, and
EDSAC The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal ''First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'', the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the Universit ...
. The appendix covered a number of
differential analyzer The differential analyser is a mechanical analogue computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, using wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. It was one of the first advanced computing devices to be used ope ...
systems and examined their sources of errors. It remains one of the most detailed accounts of early computing.


Computation Centre in Toronto

After writing her thesis, Worsley returned to Canada and told her family that the future was in computers. Unfortunately, there was no computing industry in Canada at that time, and she took a job with the
National Research Council of Canada The National Research Council Canada (NRC; ) is the primary national agency of the Government of Canada dedicated to science and technology research and development. It is the largest federal research and development organization in Canada. Th ...
(NRC), where she worked in the aerodynamics department. Through this period, the University of Toronto had been setting plans to open a computing department, both as a research facility at the university and as a service bureau, selling time on the machines to commercial and government users. In September 1947 the first funds were provided by the NRC to purchase two IBM
punch card A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a stiff paper-based medium used to store digital information via the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Developed over the 18th to 20th centuries, punched cards were wide ...
mechanical calculators and two assistants to run them. Worsley heard of the effort and applied to the position, having been at the NRC only a few months. She joined the new department in January 1948. One of her first jobs at the centre was a contract with Atomic Energy of Canada (AECL) to provide computational support, along with staff advisor Kelly Gotlieb and J. Perham Stanley, another assistant hired at the same time as Worsley. During the summer of 1948, she built a differential analyzer from
Meccano Meccano is a brand of construction set created in 1898 by Frank Hornby in Liverpool, England. The system consists of reusable metal strips, plates, angle girders, wheels, axles and gears, and plastic parts that are connected using nuts and ...
parts, similar to the one described by Hartree and Arthur Porter in 1935. Little information on this analyzer survives; a second model, or perhaps a rebuild of the original, was built by students in 1951.


Cambridge

With the analyzer completed, Worsley and Stanley were sent to the UK to learn what they could of the EDSAC design, then under construction at Cambridge University's Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory. They arrived to find the machine nearly completed, and helped where they could to bring it online for its first test run on 6 May 1949. The first program to run successfully on the machine was one Worsley helped write for calculating squares, and she later collected this and a number of similar programs into one of the earliest papers on the topic, ''The E.D.S.A.C. Demonstration''. The next month, a meeting was held at Cambridge on the topic of computing machines, and Worsley prepared a report on the program that produced squares, and a new one that produced tables of
prime number A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a Product (mathematics), product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime ...
s. The report included sample output, as well as a description of the code and how it was run on the machine. This was printed in the conference proceedings, and was picked up years later by
Brian Randell Brian Randell (born 1936) is a British computer scientist, and emeritus professor at the School of Computing, Newcastle University, United Kingdom. He specialises in research into software fault tolerance and dependability, and is a noted ...
for his famous 1973 book, ''The Origins of Digital Computers''. This made Worsley well known in the computing field long after the events. Worsley then began her PhD at Newnham College. While working at the Lab, she attended courses on
quantum physics Quantum mechanics is the fundamental physical Scientific theory, theory that describes the behavior of matter and of light; its unusual characteristics typically occur at and below the scale of atoms. Reprinted, Addison-Wesley, 1989, It is ...
with
Paul Dirac Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac ( ; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English mathematician and Theoretical physics, theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Dirac laid the foundations for bot ...
, John Lennard-Jones and Nicholas Kemmer,
number theory Number theory is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and arithmetic functions. Number theorists study prime numbers as well as the properties of mathematical objects constructed from integers (for example ...
with Albert Ingham, and perhaps most importantly, numerical analysis with
Douglas Hartree Douglas Rayner Hartree (27 March 1897 – 12 February 1958) was an English mathematician and physicist most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree–Fock equations of atomic physics and the c ...
. She began writing her dissertation under Hartree, who coincidentally also supervised another Canadian woman, Charlotte Fischer. In the midst of this work, for unknown reasons, Worsley returned to Toronto and continued her dissertation under UofT maths professor Byron Griffith. Shortly thereafter she was rehired by the Computation Centre in July 1951. Hartree approved the dissertation and Worsley received her doctorate in 1952. Her paper, ''Serial Programming for Real and Idealized Digital Calculating Machines'', is considered to be the first PhD dissertation written about modern computers. It included a number of discussions about numerical calculations on
Turing machine A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algori ...
s as well as real-world examples, notably EDSAC. It then went on to describe methods for recognizing which machine instructions were required, and which could be accomplished by combinations of other instructions. Both Turing and
Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and the man who laid the foundations of th ...
had discussed idealized versions of this concept, but Worsley's contribution was to demonstrate the most efficient way to do this, not a single generalized solution as in Shannon's case.


FERUT and Transcode

During the summer of 1948, the Computing Centre approached the NRC with plans to build a copy of Bell Labs' Mark 6 relay-based digital computer. Given a tentative go-ahead, they approached Northern Electric to obtain blueprints for the design, and were told there would be a license fee of $25,000 (). They returned to the NRC in March 1949 for an additional $50,000 for the license and construction costs, but the NRC wisely told them to drop these plans and build an electronic version instead. Together, the university and NRC planned an ambitious program to build a first-rate computer to be used by NRC, the Defense Research Board and industry. Known as UTEC, construction began in 1951 but quickly ran into serious problems due to the unreliability of their
Williams tube The Williams tube, or the Williams–Kilburn tube named after inventors Frederic Calland Williams, Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, is an early form of computer memory. It was the first Random-access memory, random-access digital storage devi ...
memory systems. It was not until late that year that the system was finally reliable enough to be used. At this point the Centre approached the NRC for funding to complete the system with a parallel math unit. AECL had been growing increasingly frustrated with the lack of a usable machine, and when they heard NRC had been approached to continue UTEC development they suggested the funds would be better spent buying a complete machine. Bennett Lewis of AECL was aware that
Ferranti Ferranti International PLC or simply Ferranti was a UK-based electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century, from 1885 until its bankruptcy in 1993. At its peak, Ferranti was a significant player in power grid system ...
had built a complete Ferranti Mark 1 machine for AECL's counterpart in the UK, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, only to be left holding it when the incoming government cancelled its funding. This was available for only $30,000 (), about the same as the first round of funding required for the expanded UTEC. The machine was purchased in early 1952 and arrived in early 1952, before Worsley rejoined the centre. She was aware of the machine's arrival, and christened it FERUT for "Ferranti Electronic computer at the University of Toronto". The machine was operational by the summer, providing UofT with one of the most powerful computers in the world. In the fall of 1953, Worsley and
Patterson Hume James Nairn Patterson "Pat" Hume (17 March 1923 – 9 May 2013) was a Canadian professor and science educator who has been called "Canada's pioneer of computer programming". He was a professor of Physics and of Computer Science at the Univers ...
began development of a new
computer language A computer language is a formal language used to communicate with a computer. Types of computer languages include: * Software construction#Construction languages, Construction language – all forms of communication by which a human can Comput ...
for the machine, known as Transcode. This was similar to Autocode being developed by Alick Glennie at the
University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...
for the same machine, but took advantage of several design notes of the Mark I to produce a faster and somewhat easier to use language. One major advantage was the conversion from decimal to binary and back, which allowed programmers to enter numbers in decimal form.


Queen's University

In spite of impressive credentials from Cambridge, a series of well respected papers, and several firsts in the industry, Worsley was repeatedly passed over for promotion within the University of Toronto. It was not until 1960 that she was promoted from a staff member to an assistant professor, and not until 1964 that she was promoted to assistant professor of physics and computer science. In comparison to the other members of the early days of the Computation Center, she received far less recognition. In 1965, Worsley was offered a job at Queen's University, launching their new Computer Centre based on an
IBM 1620 The IBM 1620 was a model of scientific minicomputer produced by IBM. It was announced on October 21, 1959, and was then marketed as an inexpensive scientific computer. After a total production of about two thousand machines, it was withdrawn on N ...
. At Queen's her duties turned more to teaching, and took up most of her time by 1971. In September of that year, after 20 years in the field, she took a
sabbatical A sabbatical (from the Hebrew: (i.e., Sabbath); in Latin ; Greek: ) is a rest or break from work; "an extended period of time intentionally spent on something that’s not your routine job." The concept of the sabbatical is based on the Bi ...
at the Department of Applied Analysis and Computer Science at the
University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...
. On 8 May 1972, in Waterloo, Worsley suffered a fatal heart attack.


Awards

In 2014, Worsley was posthumously awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science by the Canadian Association of Computer Science.


Notes


References


Citations


Bibliography

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Archival record

{{DEFAULTSORT:Worsley, Beatrice Canadian computer scientists Canadian women computer scientists 1972 deaths 1921 births Alumni of Newnham College, Cambridge People of the Cold War University of Toronto alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Academic staff of the University of Toronto Canadian women scientists Mexican emigrants to Canada Mexican expatriates in England Canadian expatriates in England Deaths from coronary artery disease Bishop Strachan School alumni