Beryl May Dent MIEE (10 May 1900 – 9 August 1977) was an English mathematical physicist, technical librarian, and a programmer of early analogue and digital computers to solve electrical engineering problems.

Later work has shown that the results they obtained had direct application to atomic force microscopy by predicting that non-contact imaging is possible only at small tip-sample separations.

Beryl May was born on (1900-05-10)10 May 1900, at Penley Villa, Park Lane, Chippenham, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of Agnes Dent (1869–1967), née Thornley, and Eustace Edward (1868–1954).

[5][6] In March 1894, she had applied for the headship at Fairfield School, Cockermouth, making the shortlist, but the board decided to appoint a local candidate.

[45]: 116 [46]: 10  In the same period that Dent was at RAE, Lorna Swain, then mathematics tutor at Newnham College in the University of Cambridge, worked at the establishment on the problem of aircraft propeller vibration.

[51][50]: 1  After spending the summer of 1921 at her parents' home in Warminster,[52] she returned for the start of the 1921 to 1922 academic year to find that Paul Dirac had joined the mathematics course.

[62][o] Dent spent the summer of 1924 at her parents' home in Warminster, playing mixed doubles tennis in a tournament organised by the local Women's Unionist Association.

[64] In September of the same year, she was appointed an assistant teacher in mathematics at the High School for Girls, in Barnsley, Huddersfield Road, on an annual salary of £250 (equivalent to £18,000 in 2023).

[72][51] Lennard‑Jones and Dent published six papers together from 1926 to 1928, dealing with the forces between atoms and ions, with the objective of calculating theoretically the properties of carbonate and nitrate crystals.

[87] Marjorie Josephine Littleton, the daughter of a local Bristol councillor and a graduate of Girton College, University of Cambridge, was appointed as her replacement on the 1 February 1930.

[91] In 1917, a Research and Education Department was established at the Trafford Park site, when the care of the library came within the remit of James George Pearce.

[95]: 412  Technical librarianship emerged as a new scientific career in interwar Britain and rapidly became one of the few types of professional industrial employment that was routinely open to both women and men.

In "On observations of points connected by a linear relation" (1935), she developed a detailed reduced major axis method for line fitting that built on the work of Robert Adcock and Charles Kummell.

[98][99] In 1937, David Myers, then at the Engineering Laboratory at the University of Oxford, asked Douglas Hartree and Arthur Porter to calculate the space charge limitation of secondary current in a triode.

For example, Cyril Frederick Gradwell, a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, asked her to scrutinise the algebraic part of his work in "The Solution of a problem in disk bending occurring in connexion with gas turbines" (1950).

[102][z] She would later analyse the problem of stress distribution in a thick disk based on a method devised by Philip Pollock,[104] for Richard William Bailey, the former director of the mechanical, metallurgical, and chemical sections of the research department at Metropolitan-Vickers.

Their paper outlined a procedure for calculating the theoretical deflection (bending) of a circular grid of support girders for a graphite neutron moderator in a gas-cooled reactor.

[85]: 12–13 [125] After moving to Manchester in January 1930, Dent found shared lodgings at 10 Montrose Avenue, West Didsbury, in the same house as Roxbee who, at that time, was a teacher at Whalley Range High School.

[59] In 1962, Dent and her mother moved from Stretford to 1 Cokeham Road, Sompting, a village in the coastal Adur District of West Sussex, between Lancing and Worthing.

[139] Her Christian faith is perhaps not unexpected, given her father's work for the church in Warminster, and the era she grew up in, where religion pervaded social and political life.

[143][144] Her ashes were interred at Worthing Crematorium, in the Gardens of Rest, towards the Spring Glades, and her entry in the book of remembrance at the crematorium states:[145][146][ac] Beryl May Dent 1900 – A real Christian loved by all – 1977The bishop's chair at St Mary's, situated close to the altar, bears a brass plaque with the following inscription:[147][ad] In loving memory of BERYL DENT 1900 – 1977An archive of Dent's papers, that relate to her life and work in the 1920s in the physics department at the University of Bristol, is held in the Special Collections of the University of Bristol Arts and Social Sciences Library, in Tyndall Avenue, Bristol.

[80][81] They gave an expression for the electric potential produced by a system of point charges in vacuum (although not a real cubic sodium chloride ionic lattice).

[151] Michael Jaycock and Geoffrey Parfitt, then respectively senior lecturer in surface and colloid chemistry at Loughborough University of Technology and professor of chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, concurred with Buckley, noting that "an ideal crystal, in which the ionic positions at the surface were identical to those achieved in the bulk crystal ... is obviously extremely improbable."

[153]: 14  Later work by Jason Cleveland, Manfred Radmacher, and Paul Hansma, has shown that this result has direct application to atomic force microscopy by predicting that non-contact imaging is possible only at small tip-sample separations.

[158]: 106  Furthermore, she argued that maximising this function to obtain the maximum likelihood estimation,[159]: 5  subject to the condition that the points are collinear, will give the parameters for the line of best fit.

[98][99] It is now believed that she was the first to propose what is often called the geometric mean functional relationship estimator of slope,[170][171] and that her essential arguments can be generalised to any number of variables.

[172] The paper was intended to show, by describing three relatively simple applications, that the digital computer could be a useful aid to the electrical design engineer.

Conversely, a hand calculation, using a method described by Thomas John Lewis in "The Transient Behaviour of Ladder Networks of the Type Representing Transformer and Machine Windings" (1954), took around three months.

They simplified the calculation of the Lennard-Jones potential by noting that the ions under study were isoelectronic with inert gas atoms, and thus, there was no need to introduce additional empirical L‑J parameters into the equation.

Examples of compounds with this structure include sodium chloride itself, along with the other alkali halides, and divalent metal oxides, sulphides, selenides, and tellurides.