Misplaced Pages

Latest revision as of 23:38, 15 October 2024

Cicely Williams
Born	Cicely Mary Popplewell (1920-10-29)29 October 1920 Bramhall, Stockport, England
Died	20 June 1995(1995-06-20) (aged 74) Stockport, England
Alma mater	University of Cambridge (BA, MA)
Known for	Work on Manchester Mark 1 and Ferranti Mark 1
Spouse	George Keith Williams
Scientific career
Fields	Software engineering
Institutions	University of Manchester

Cicely Mary Williams (née Popplewell; 29 October 1920 – 20 June 1995) was a British software engineer who worked with Alan Turing on the Manchester Mark 1 computer.

Early life and education

Popplewell was born on 29 October 1920 in Bramhall, Stockport, England. Her parents were Bessie (née Fazakerley) and Alfred Popplewell, a chartered accountant. She attended Sherbrook Private Girls School at Greaves Hall in Lancashire.

She studied the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge where she worked with statistics in the form of punched cards. She was considered an expert in the Brunsviga desk calculator.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1942, which was converted to a Master of Arts degree in 1949 from Girton College, Cambridge.

Career

In 1943 she was a Technical Assistant in the Experimental Department at Rolls-Royce Ltd. and joined the Women's Engineering Society.

In 1949 Popplewell joined Alan Turing in the Computer Machine Learning department at the University of Manchester to help with the programming of a prototype computer. At first she shared an office with Turing and Audrey Bates, a University of Manchester mathematics graduate. Her first role was to create a library for the prototype Manchester Mark 1. This included input/output routines and mathematical functions, and a reciprocal square root routine. She worked on ray tracing. She wrote the first versions of sections of the subroutines for functions like COSINE. Together they designed the programming language for the Ferranti Mark 1.

She wrote the Programmers Handbook for the Ferranti Mark 1 in 1951, reworking Turing's programming manual to make it comprehensible. Whilst Turing worked on Scheme A, an early operating system, Popplewell proposed Scheme B, which allowed for decimal numbers, in 1952.

Popplewell went on to become an advisor and administrator in the newly formed University of Manchester Computing Service where she was remembered as a 'universally liked' mother-figure. She left the Service in the late 1960s shortly before her marriage.

Popplewell taught the first ever programming class in Argentina at the University of Buenos Aires in 1961. Her class there included the computer scientist Cecilia Berdichevsky. She was supported by the British Council.

Popplewell published the textbook Information Processing in 1962.

Her life was documented in Jonathan Swinton's 2019 book Alan Turing’s Manchester.

Personal life

In 1969 Popplewell married George Keith Williams in Chapel-en-le-Frith. She died on 20 June 1995 at Stockport Infirmary, Stockport. The funeral service was held on 27 June 1995 at St John's church, Buxton, followed by a private cremation.

References

1. Girton College (1948). Girton College Register: 1869–1946. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 559. OCLC 1442048. Privately printed for Cambridge University Press by Brooke Crutchley.
2. "Greaves Hall – The history of Greaves Hall, Banks, Nr Southport". northmeols.com. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
3. ^ Hodges, Andrew (2014). Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game – Updated Edition. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9781400865123.
4. ^ "The Woman Engineer". www2.theiet.org. Archived from the original on 4 April 2023. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
5. "Interview:David, Mike". chilton-computing.org.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
6. @theUL (21 December 2018). "@paulcoxon @message4bob @jesswade @Cambridge_Uni @OfficialUoM @Misplaced Pages @sim_manchester @WikiWomenInRed…" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
7. "The Cambridge University list of members". cam.ac.uk. 1974.
8. "The Manchester Mark 1 (Digital 60)". curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
9. Anon. "Catalogue of historical computer documents donated by Professor D B G Edwards" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 January 2023. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
10. Lavington, Simon (2012). Alan Turing and His Contemporaries: Building the World's First Computers. BCS, The Chartered Institute. ISBN 9781780171050.
11. "Alan Turing Scrapbook – Manchester Computers". turing.org.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
12. ^ Campbell-Kelly, Martin (1980). "Programming the Mark I: Early Programming Activity at the University of Manchester". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 2 (2): 130–168. doi:10.1109/mahc.1980.10018. ISSN 1058-6180. S2CID 10845153.
13. ^ "Women at the Console". University Histories. 15 March 2019. Archived from the original on 27 June 2022. Retrieved 22 March 2019.
14. "HOPL". hopl.info. Archived from the original on 19 December 2018. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
15. "Alan Turing – Mathematician, war time code breaker, pioneer of computer science and in charge of Hut 8". 1stassociated.co.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
16. "Turing Manual". curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
17. ^ "Women at the console". Alan Turing's Manchester. Retrieved 18 January 2021.
18. "The Rutherford Journal – The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology". rutherfordjournal.org. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
19. "Full text of "A history of Manchester computers (book)"". archive.org. 1975. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
20. Swinton, Jonathan (2019). Alan Turing's Manchester. Manchester: Infang Publishing. p. 119. ISBN 978-0-9931789-2-4.
21. ^ Berdichevsky, Cecilia (2006), "The Beginning of Computer Science in Argentina — Clementina – (1961–1966)", History of Computing and Education 2 (HCE2), IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, vol. 215, Springer US, pp. 203–215, doi:10.1007/978-0-387-34741-7_15, ISBN 9780387346373
22. Impagliazzo, John (27 July 2006). History of Computing and Education 2 (HCE2): IFIP 19th World Computer Congress, WG 9.7, TC 9: History of Computing, Proceedings of the Second Conference on the History of Computing and Education, August 21–24, Santiago, Chile. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9780387346373.
23. Leal, Luis Germán Rodríguez; Carnota, Raúl (1 November 2015). Historias de las TIC en América Latina y el Caribe: Inicios, desarrollos y rupturas (in Spanish). Fundación Telefónica. ISBN 9789802715282.
24. Carnota, Raul Jorge (2015). "The Beginning of Computer Science in Argentina and the Calculus Institute, 1957-1970". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 37 (4): 40–52. doi:10.1109/mahc.2015.34. ISSN 1058-6180. S2CID 16163838.
25. "Information Processing 1962: Amazon.co.uk: Cicely M Popplewell: Books". amazon.co.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
26. "Alan Turing's Manchester". The Portico Library. Archived from the original on 22 March 2019. Retrieved 22 March 2019.
27. "Ancestry – Sign In". ancestry.com. Retrieved 19 December 2018.
28. "Deaths". The Daily Telegraph. 23 June 1995. p. 28. ISSN 0307-1235. OCLC 1081089956. Retrieved 31 August 2023 – via Newspapers.com.

• 1920 births
• 1995 deaths
• Academics of the University of Manchester
• Alumni of Girton College, Cambridge
• British computer scientists
• British mathematicians
• British women computer scientists
• People from Bramhall
• Women's Engineering Society
• Academic staff of the University of Buenos Aires