Beatrice Worsley

Programmer and professor of computer science

• Born: October 18, 1921
• Place of Birth: Querétaro, Mexico
• Died: May 8, 1972
• Place of Death: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

• Primary Company/Organization: University of Toronto

Introduction

Beatrice Worsley was recognized as Canada's first female computer scientist. She worked with Henry Wallman, a member of the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on her master's thesis and studied at Cambridge University with Douglas Hartree, who developed numerical analysis, and Alan Turing, who is often called the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. Worsley built a differential analyzer and a mechanical analog computer, and she collaborated on a compiler for the Ferranti Mark I, the world's first commercially available, general-purpose computer. In 1952, she became one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in computer science.

Early Life

Beatrice Helen Worsley was born in Querétaro, Mexico, on October 18, 1921, the second child and only daughter of Joel and Beatrice Marie Worsley. Her father, born into a working-class family in Manchester, England, moved to Mexico to work in the textile mill his wife's grandparents had founded in the 1850s. Because the Worsley children were isolated from the community for their safety, their mother home-schooled them until 1929, when the family moved to Toronto, Canada. Worsley attended Brown Public School until 1934, when she entered the Bishop Strachan School, founded in 1867 as an Anglican alternative to the city's numerous Catholic schools. In 1939, she graduated with honors and awards in mathematics and science, including the Governor-General's Award for the highest overall grades.

That year, Worsley entered Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Again, she excelled academically, specializing in applied mathematics. She graduated in 1944 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics. World War II was at its height, and soon after graduation, she enlisted in the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service, known as the WRENS. Probationary Sublieutenant Beatrice Worsley reported on April 5, 1944, to the HMCS Conestoga base in Galt (now Cambridge), Ontario, the basic training center for WRENS from across Canada. On September 9, she was transferred to the Naval Research Establishment in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for harbor defense research. She was demobilized on August 11, 1946. The next month, she began graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Henry Wallman, a member of MIT's Radiation Laboratory (where the first worldwide radio navigation system was developed), served as her thesis director. In 1947, she returned to Canada and worked briefly in Ottawa at the National Research Council of Canada and for a more extended period as a project assistant at the University of Toronto Computation Centre. In 1949, she resumed her graduate studies in mathematical physics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, where her dissertation was directed by Douglas Hartree, who built a mechanical computer for solving differential equations. Worsley was awarded a Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1952.

Life's Work

Worsley, for unknown reasons, returned to Canada in 1951 and completed writing her dissertation there. Hartree came to Canada to award her degree a year later. Before she had her Ph.D. in hand, she had returned to work at the University of Toronto Computation Centre. Her strength lay in adapting scientific problems to be solved using transcoding (data conversion) and the Ferut, Worsley's name for the Mark I general-purpose computer built by the Ferranti firm and purchased by the University of Toronto. As the Ferut was installed at the Computation Centre during the spring and summer of 1952, Worsley found herself operating the console. The Ferut was a tricky computer to learn to program. Worsley and a colleague were responsible for teaching methods of programming to computer novices, including actuaries, scientists, and graduate students. Fewer than 30 percent could master the lessons, which contained both theoretical and practical components. As the only computing facility in Canada, the Computation Centre needed to simplify the programming cycle for remote users. Worsley and J. N. Patterson Hume, an assistant professor from the physics department, were asked to create an automatic coding system for the Ferut. They called their project Transcode and wrote the compiler within a year. Transcode worked. Basic lessons could be taught in two hours, and the time for returning calculations was cut from weeks to days. Both Worsley and Hume wrote articles that appeared in the Journal of the ACM and Physics in Canada announcing Transcode and describing the new and effective tool for physicists and other scientists. By 1958, when an IBM 650 replaced the ancient Ferut, Transcode had benefited hundreds of faculty and students and dozens of research groups across Canada.

Most of the seventeen papers Worsley published between 1952 and 1964 focused on Transcode and the Ferut. Other articles stemmed from her Cambridge work on self-consistent field calculations. In September 1955, the Pure Physics Division of the National Research Council (NRC) and the Computation Centre launched a joint project to develop the Hartree-Fock formulations for digital computers and calculate specific atomic wave functions. Working with J. F. Hart of the National Research Council, Worsley coded the routines for the Ferut. Hartree consulted on the project until his death in 1958, and the general scheme Worsley used can be found in his 1957 text The Calculation of Atomic Structures. By 1960, Worsley was spending more time teaching than engaging in research. With each upgrade in the computer, her course load increased. University extension courses in the mid-1950s became graduate courses when the IBM 650 was installed at the Computation Centre in 1958. By the time the discipline of computer science was emerging as a distinct field, Worsley was teaching undergraduates as well.

Despite her Ph.D. from a prestigious university, an impressive publication record, and valuable research, it was not until 1960 that Worsley was promoted to assistant professor, and it took another four years and the creation of a graduate department of computer science before she was promoted to associate professor. In 1965, Worsley accepted a position at the Computing Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Queen's hired Worsley to help launch and manage its new Computer Centre with the IBM 1620, but her teaching responsibilities were heavier than they had been in Toronto.

The courses she taught were heavily grounded in numerical analysis, covered programming techniques using Fortran and WATFOR (the popular student-oriented Fortran compiler written at the University of Waterloo in the mid-1960s), and included material on the mathematical principles of computing. Added to the teaching were numerous administrative responsibilities, all without even an assistant professor's title. As computer science adviser to the Computing Centre, she was charged with selecting books and journals for the center's library, coordinating the programming staff, advising local high school teachers on computer issues, arranging seminars, and authorizing computer time. It is hardly surprising that there was no time for research and few rewards. It was not until 1968, when a master's program was created at Queen's along with a new Department of Computing and Information Science, that Worsley was given a joint appointment and promoted to associate professor in the new department.

In September 1971, Worsley was granted her first sabbatical year since she had arrived at Queen's. She planned to spend the year at the Department of Applied Analysis and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Her purpose in going to Waterloo was to study assembler coding as it related to computer architecture. A logical assumption is that she wanted to return to her early research interests. However, her research would remain incomplete. She died in May 1972.

Personal Life

In an early interview, Worsley indicated that she was interested in music generally and in playing the piano particularly, and that she enjoyed photography. Little else is known of her private life. A shy, reserved woman by all accounts, she appeared content to make her work her life. An early member of the Association for Computing Machinery, she joined special-interest groups on university computing and information retrieval in the 1960s. Worsley also served as the Toronto region correspondent for the Quarterly Bulletin of the Computing and Data Processing Society of Canada from 1962 to 1965 and as the director of the national executive in 1968 (now renamed the Canadian Information Processing Society), and technical editor for the Quarterly Bulletin from 1970 to 1971.

On May 8, 1972, while in Waterloo on sabbatical, Beatrice Worsley suffered a fatal heart attack. She was survived by her brother Charles. She left her estate to the University of Cambridge. It was used to found the Lundgren Fund, in honor of Helge Lundgren. The Lundgren Research Award is presented to Ph.D. students, not ordinarily residents of the United Kingdom, who have completed at least four terms at Cambridge University and are engaged in research in a scientific subject, which can include mathematics. Preference is given to candidates who work in the computer laboratory or whose research has been “interrupted by national service or personal misfortune.” Worsley was awarded a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award by the Canadian Association of Computer Science in 2014.

Bibliography

Campbell, Scott M. “Beatrice Helen Worsley: Canada's Female Computer Pioneer.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25.4 (2003): 51-62. Print.

Ensmenger, Nathan L. The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise. Cambridge: MIT, 2010. Print.

Friedland, Martin Lawrence. The University of Toronto: A History. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. Print.

Misa, Thomas J., ed. Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing. New York: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press, 2010. Print.

Raymond, Katrine. “Beatrice Worsley." Canadian Encyclopedia, 9 Sept. 2020, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/beatrice-worsley.  Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.