Kathleen Booth
One of the founders of the digital computer era is someone you’ve likely never heard of: Kathleen Booth. She was born July 9, 1922 in Worcestershire, England and attended the University of London, where she earned undergraduate and PhD degrees in mathematics. While she was studying at the University of London she was a faculty member at Birkbeck College, which is actually part of the University. Midway through her PhD program, in 1947, she travelled to the US as a research assistant. She spent most of her time at Princeton, where she wrote a paper describing modifications to improve a computer called the Automated Relay Computer (ARC). More than that, she created the first assembly programming language.
Her trip to the US was memorable for another reason: the professor she was assisting was Andrew Booth, also a computer scientist and developer of magnetic drum memory. And if the name “Booth” sounds familiar, that’s because the two professors got married after their return to England. Although he was a full professor and she was a PhD student, their ages only differed by four years.
Back in England the Booths comprised a small computer development team, and from 1947 to 1953 they produced three separate computers — and in those days designing and building a computer was a huge project. Their third machine, the All-Purpose Electronic Rayon Computer (APE(X)C), was turned into a product by the British Tabulating Machine Company. Both of the Booths wrote books about the APE(X)C, and Kathleen taught one of the first college courses in computer programming.
Booth (Kathleen, that is) did early work on neural networks, and created some of the first pattern- and character-recognition software. Then in 1961 Booth (Andrew this time) was passed over for a chairmanship at Birnbeck, and both Booths resigned in protest and moved to Canada. They both found new university positions; Kathleen became a research fellow at the University of Saskatchewan, then became professor of mathematics at Lakehead University. Andrew went straight to Lakehead, where he eventually became president.
Kathleen Book stayed active academically at least through the age of 71, when she published the paper Using Neural Nets to Identify Marine Mammals. It was coauthored by Dr. Ian Booth, who was also her son. She didn’t publish after that, and it’s unclear whether she retired or simply became less active, but she lived another 29 years, and passed away in 2022 at the age of 100. Assembly language isn’t used all that much any more, but if you do ever delve into it, tip a register to Kathleen Booth, who assembled the first assembler.
