Mike Woodger

Michael Woodger (28 March 1923 - 14 July 2025) was an English pioneering computer scientist who spent most of his career at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, London. Beginning his computing career as an assistant to Alan Turing in 1946, he played an important role in the development and application of the Pilot ACE and full ACE computers, and later contributed to the design and documentation of the ALGOL 60 and Ada programming languages. In April 2023, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, he was named an Honorary Fellow of The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC).

Early life and education Woodger was born in Epsom, Surrey, on 28 March 1923, the eldest of four children. His father, the theoretical biologist Joseph Henry Woodger (1894-1981), was professor of biology at the University of London and was known for his work on building a foundation of mathematical logic for biology, drawing on Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. The elder Woodger taught his son symbolic logic from an early age, providing Mike with an unusually rigorous early grounding in formal methods.

Pilot ACE After Turing's departure from NPL in 1947, and following the laboratory's recruitment of staff with pulse-electronics experience, the development of a reduced version of the ACE design known as the Pilot ACE was undertaken in earnest, becoming operational in 1950. Woodger's principal role was the writing of standard procedures for mathematical operations for the new machine, which were tested and put to use on Pilot ACE's first operational runs.

He went on to develop an automatic system for handling matrices in the machine's small main store, which made the manipulation of arrays of mathematical data accessible to users unfamiliar with the machine-level code of Pilot ACE and incorporated space-saving and error-checking features. The system was subsequently rewritten for the English Electric DEUCE, the commercial successor to Pilot ACE, and in that form was widely used into the 1960s.

Selected publications Woodger, M. (1951). "Automatic Computing Engine of the National Physical Laboratory". Nature. 167 (4244): 270. doi:10.1038/167270a0 Naur, Peter; Backus, John; et al. (1960). "Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60". Communications of the ACM. (Woodger one of 13 joint authors.) Woodger, M. (1972). "On Semantic Levels in Programming". In Freiman, C. V. (ed.). Information Processing 71: Proc. IFIP Congress 71, Ljubljana, August 1971. Amsterdam: North-Holland. pp. 402-407.