Martha Evens

Martha Walton Evens (born 1935) is an emeritus professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She worked on the first spelling correction program at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the late 1950s. Evens was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1984.

Biography Evens graduated summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in 1955 with a major in mathematics, having taken many courses in Greek. She shared the European Fellowship (with Nancy Degenhardt, Greek major). Evens was president of the classics club and played field hockey and basketball.

After finishing her studies at Bryn Mawr, she received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the University of Paris. Her first interaction with a computer was in the summer of 1957 when she received her M.A. in mathematics from Radcliffe College and was hired as a "Mathematician" by Oliver Selfridge at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. That computer was an IBM 709, in computer science from Northwestern University in 1975. Subsequently, she became a member of the Computer Science faculty at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), where she remained.

Tribute The annual Martha Evens Distinguished Lecture Series in Computer Science was established by her students and colleagues at IIT. Speakers are computer scientists of international whose contributions have broad impact both within and beyond the bounds of the discipline. The 2023 speaker was Bonnie J. Dorr.

Personal life Martha was married to Leonard Evens, a mathematics professor, from 1958 until his death in 2020. She has three children and five grandchildren.

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