Beatrice Helen Worsley (18 October 1921[a] – 8 May 1972) was a Canadian computer scientist, the first woman in the country to work in that profession.
She wrote the first program to run on EDSAC, 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 for over 20 years before her death at the age of 50.
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.
[4] Worsley won the Burnside Scholarship in Science from Trinity College, part of the University of Toronto, and began studies in September 1939.
After basic training at HMCS Conestoga[b] in Galt (today known as Cambridge, Ontario), she was assigned to the Naval Research Establishment (NRE) in Halifax.
[6] 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".
[6] 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.
In September 1947 the first funds were provided by the NRC to purchase two IBM punch card mechanical calculators and two assistants to run them.
[9] 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.
[13] This was printed in the conference proceedings, and was picked up years later by Brian Randell for his famous 1973 book, The Origins of Digital Computers.
While working at the Lab, she attended courses on quantum physics with Paul Dirac, John Lennard-Jones and Nicholas Kemmer, number theory with Albert Ingham, and perhaps most importantly, numerical analysis with Douglas Hartree.
[14] In the midst of this work, for unknown reasons, Worsley returned to Toronto[15] and continued her dissertation under UofT maths professor Byron Griffith.
[14] Her paper, Serial Programming for Real and Idealized Digital Calculating Machines, is considered to be the first PhD dissertation written about modern computers.
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 (equivalent to $332,839 in 2023).
Known as UTEC, construction began in 1951 but quickly ran into serious problems due to the unreliability of their Williams tube memory systems.
[20] This was similar to Autocode being developed by Alick Glennie at the University of Manchester 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.
[21] 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.