Misplaced Pages

Cicely Popplewell

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by -Zai- (talk | contribs) at 12:24, 7 April 2021. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 12:24, 7 April 2021 by -Zai- (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

British software engineer
Cicely Williams
BornCicely Mary Popplewell
29 October 1920 (1920-10-29)
Stockport, England
Died1995 (aged 74–75)
Buxton, England
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge (BA, MA)
Known forWork on Manchester Mark 1 and Ferranti Mark 1
SpouseGeorge Keith Williams
Scientific career
FieldsSoftware engineering
InstitutionsUniversity of Manchester

Cicely Mary Williams (née Popplewell) October 29, 1920 – June 20, 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 October 29, 1920 in 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 in 1995 in Buxton, England.

References

  1. "Ancestry – birth record". www.ancestry.co.uk. Retrieved 18 January 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  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. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
  5. "Interview:David, Mike". chilton-computing.org.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  6. https://twitter.com/theUL/status/1076092273933340673
  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). 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. 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. 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. Retrieved 22 March 2019.
  27. "Ancestry – Sign In". ancestry.com. Retrieved 19 December 2018.
Categories: