Kathleen Booth

Kathleen Hylda Valerie Booth ( Britten, 9 July 1922 – 29 September 2022) was a British computer scientist and mathematician who co-wrote the first assembly language and co-designed the assembler and autocode for the first computer systems at Birkbeck College, University of London. She helped design three different machines including the ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator), SEC (Simple Electronic Computer), and APE(X)C.

Early life and education Hylda Valerie Britten was born in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, England, on 9 July 1922 She grew up in the West Midlands area and attended the King Edward VI Grammar School for Girls in Birmingham. Booth went on to obtain a BSc in mathematics from Royal Holloway, University of London in 1944 and a PhD in Applied Mathematics in 1950 from King's College London.

Career Kathleen Booth worked at Birkbeck College, 1946–62. She travelled to the United States as Andrew Booth's research assistant in 1947, visiting with John von Neumann at Princeton University. While at Princeton, she co-authored "General Considerations in the Design of an All Purpose Electronic Digital Computer", describing modifications to the original ARC redesign to the ARC2 using a von Neumann architecture. She also built and maintained ARC components.

Kathleen and Andrew Booth's team at Birkbeck were considered the smallest of the early British computer groups. From 1947 to 1953, they produced three machines: ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator) built with fellow research assistant Xenia Sweeting, She and Mr. Booth worked on the same team.

Booth regularly published papers concerning her work on the ARC and APE(X)C systems and co-wrote "Automatic Digital Calculators" (1953) which illustrated the 'Planning and Coding' programming style. In 1957, Kathleen Booth, her husband Andrew, and J.C. Jennings co-founded Birkbeck College's Department of Numerical Automation, now the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences.

From 1944 she was a Junior Scientific Officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough. Kathleen Booth retired from Lakehead in 1978. After retiring, the Booths started a consulting business that worked with the Canadian Department of National Defence and the Institute of Ocean Sciences in British Columbia on acoustic modelling and the effects of ocean shipping noise on the communication of marine mammals.

Her last current paper was published in 1993 at the age of 71.

Personal life and death

Booth married her colleague Andrew Donald Booth in 1950 and had two children, Ian, who became a physicist, and Amanda, who became a veterinarian.

Booth died in Sooke, British Columbia on 29 September 2022, at the age of 100.