Ida Rhodes

Ida Rhodes (born Hadassah Itzkowitz; May 15, 1900 – February 1, 1986[1]) was an American mathematician who became a member of the clique of influential women at the heart of early computer development in the United States.

[2] She was 13 years old in 1913 when her parents, David and Bessie (née Sinkler) Itzkowitz, brought her to the United States.

[1] She received her BA in mathematics in February, 1923 and her MA in September of the same year, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.

In 1949, the Department of Commerce awarded her a Gold Medal for "significant pioneering leadership and outstanding contributions to the scientific progress of the Nation in the functional design and the application of electronic digital computing equipment".

Her work became much more widely known after her retirement, as she took the occasion to travel around the globe, lecturing and maintaining international correspondence.

Filming of Ida Rhodes (left) at IBM. National Bureau of Standards (NBS) mathematician and computer expert Ida Rhodes demonstrates her pioneering work in computer translation of languages. Rhodes was among the first to realize the importance of parsing sentences and separating the roots of words from their prefixes and suffixes as initial steps in the process of computer translation.