Ida Rhodes

Filming of Ida Rhodes (left) at IBM. National Bureau of Standards (NBS) mathematician and computer expert Ida Rhodes demonstrates her pioneering work in computer translation of languages. Rhodes was among the first to realize the importance of parsing sentences and separating the roots of words from their prefixes and suffixes as initial steps in the process of computer translation.

Ida Rhodes (born Hadassah Itzkowitz; May 15, 1900 – February 1, 1986

She was 13 years old in 1913 when her parents, David and Bessie Itzkowitz, brought her to the United States. Her name was changed upon entering the country to Ida Itzkowitz.

She sustained a connection to her Judaism even in her computing work, publishing a paper called “Computation of the Dates of the Hebrew New Year and Passover” in Computers and Mathematics with Applications in 1977.

Career Rhodes was awarded the New York State Cash Scholarship and a Cornell University Tuition Scholarship

Though she retired in 1964, Rhodes continued to consult for the Applied Mathematics Division of the National Bureau of Standards until 1971. Her work became much more widely known after her retirement, as she took the occasion to travel around the globe, lecturing and maintaining international correspondence. In 1976, the Department of Commerce presented her with a further Certificate of Appreciation on the 25th Anniversary of UNIVAC I, and then at the 1981 Computer Conference cited her a third time as a "UNIVAC I pioneer." She died in 1986.

In an unusual case of an old specialized algorithm still in use, and still credited to the original developer, in 1977 Rhodes was responsible for the "Jewish Holiday" algorithm used in calendar programs to this day. While at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), she also did original work in machine translation of natural languages.