[1] Pat Fothergill was born in Woodford Wells, Essex, England in 1936 to an English father Leonard and a Welsh mother Sarah (née Kinton).
[2] During her early childhood, her family moved to Singapore and then to South Africa to accommodate her father's career as a civil engineer.
[4] She received distinction in Pure Mathematics and a State Scholarship from the UK Ministry of Education to attend Newnham College, Cambridge.
She helped develop the robot command language RAPT,[7] and worked with Robin Popplestone[7] and Rod Burstall[8] amongst others.
Whilst at Aberdeen, Pat co-authored the paper "WPFM: the Workspace Prediction and Fast Matching Algorithm"[9] with Jonathan C Aylett and Robert B Fisher.