Hilary J. Kahn (1943–2007) was a South African British computer scientist who spent most of her career as a professor at the University of Manchester, where she worked on computer-aided design and information modelling.
[3][4][5] Kahn was born in 1943 in Cape Town, South Africa and moved in 1960 to England; she said later that she did so to pursue her education and escape the politics of her native country.
[1] She attended the University of London and studied classics, after which she attended a post-graduate diploma course in computing at the Newcastle University, where she was first exposed to working with the English Electric KDF9 computer and programming in ALGOL.
[1] Kahn joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Manchester in 1967,[3] appointed as an assistant lecturer based on her ability to teach COBOL.
She has been cited as an example of how women with non-traditional backgrounds could enter early academic computer science by offering unusual specialised skills.