Kathleen Booth

Kathleen Britten was a mathematician at Birkbeck College in London and from 1946 worked with Andrew Booth, whom she married in 1950. The machine was ARC, the Automatic Relay Calculator. Her 1947 report Coding for A.R.C. expressed instructions as mnemonic letter codes that a program then translated into machine code — an assembler, a couple of years before the word existed.

That same year the pair travelled to Princeton to meet von Neumann, and afterwards co-wrote a sketch of how a general-purpose electronic computer ought to be designed. She took her doctorate in 1950, went on to the SEC and APE(X)C machines, co-authored the textbook Automatic Digital Calculators (1953), and in the late 1950s made early attempts at character recognition using neural networks. She died in 2022, aged one hundred and rarely mentioned.