Kathleen Booth

Kathleen Britten was born in Stourbridge in 1922, the daughter of a tax clerk. She took a mathematics degree at Royal Holloway in 1944 and went to work at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, then joined a small research group at Birkbeck College in London led by Andrew Booth. They were building a computer with next to no funding, in a group that at times consisted of the two of them.

In 1947 they went to Princeton to work with John von Neumann. Coming back, she wrote a paper with Booth on the design of a general-purpose electronic computer, and for its successor, the ARC2, she devised a notation that let a programmer write instructions in short readable codes rather than in raw numbers. It was the first assembly language. She built and maintained the machine\'s components herself. The group produced three computers between 1947 and 1953, and one of them became the basis of the first mass-produced British business computer.

She married Booth in 1950, completed a PhD, wrote one of the first programming textbooks, and in 1955 gave a public demonstration of a machine translating from French. She later wrote programs that simulated how animals recognise patterns, early work in what is now called neural networks.

In 1962, after Birkbeck refused her husband a chair, they resigned and moved to Canada. She taught there until she retired, and died in 2022, aged 100.