Cicely Williams
Born
Cicely Mary Popplewell

(1920-10-29)29 October 1920
Bramhall, Stockport, England
Died20 June 1995(1995-06-20) (aged 74)
Stockport, England
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge (BA, MA)
Known forWork on Manchester Mark 1 and Ferranti Mark 1
SpouseGeorge Keith Williams
Scientific career
FieldsSoftware engineering
InstitutionsUniversity of Manchester

Cicely Mary Williams (née Popplewell; 29 October 1920 – 20 June 1995) was a British software engineer who worked with Alan Turing on the Manchester Mark 1 computer.

Early life and education

Popplewell was born on 29 October 1920 in Bramhall, Stockport, England.[1] Her parents were Bessie (née Fazakerley) and Alfred Popplewell, a chartered accountant. She attended Sherbrook Private Girls School at Greaves Hall in Lancashire.[2]

She studied the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge[3][4] where she worked with statistics in the form of punched cards.[3] She was considered an expert in the Brunsviga desk calculator.[5]

She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1942, which was converted to a Master of Arts degree in 1949 from Girton College, Cambridge.[6][7]

Career

In 1943 she was a Technical Assistant in the Experimental Department at Rolls-Royce Ltd. and joined the Women's Engineering Society.[4]

In 1949 Popplewell joined Alan Turing in the Computer Machine Learning department at the University of Manchester to help with the programming of a prototype computer.[8][9] At first she shared an office with Turing and Audrey Bates, a University of Manchester mathematics graduate.[10][11] Her first role was to create a library for the prototype Manchester Mark 1.[12] This included input/output routines and mathematical functions, and a reciprocal square root routine.[12] She worked on ray tracing.[12] She wrote the first versions of sections of the subroutines for functions like COSINE.[13] Together they designed the programming language for the Ferranti Mark 1.[14][15]

She wrote the Programmers Handbook for the Ferranti Mark 1 in 1951, reworking Turing's programming manual to make it comprehensible.[16][17] Whilst Turing worked on Scheme A, an early operating system, Popplewell proposed Scheme B, which allowed for decimal numbers, in 1952.[18][19]

Popplewell went on to become an advisor and administrator in the newly formed University of Manchester Computing Service where she was remembered as a 'universally liked' mother-figure.[20] She left the Service in the late 1960s shortly before her marriage.[17]

Popplewell taught the first ever programming class in Argentina at the University of Buenos Aires in 1961.[21][22][23] Her class there included the computer scientist Cecilia Berdichevsky.[21] She was supported by the British Council.[24]

Popplewell published the textbook Information Processing in 1962.[25]

Her life was documented in Jonathan Swinton's 2019 book Alan Turing’s Manchester.[13][26]

Personal life

In 1969 Popplewell married George Keith Williams in Chapel-en-le-Frith.[27] She died on 20 June 1995 at Stockport Infirmary, Stockport. The funeral service was held on 27 June 1995 at St John's church, Buxton, followed by a private cremation.[28]

References

  1. ↑ Girton College (1948). Girton College Register: 1869–1946. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 559. OCLC 1442048. Privately printed for Cambridge University Press by Brooke Crutchley.
  2. ↑ "Greaves Hall – The history of Greaves Hall, Banks, Nr Southport". northmeols.com. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  3. 1 2 Hodges, Andrew (2014). Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game – Updated Edition. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9781400865123.
  4. 1 2 "The Woman Engineer". www2.theiet.org. Archived from the original on 4 April 2023. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
  5. ↑ "Interview:David, Mike". chilton-computing.org.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  6. ↑ @theUL (21 December 2018). "@paulcoxon @message4bob @jesswade @Cambridge_Uni @OfficialUoM @Wikipedia @sim_manchester @WikiWomenInRed…" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  7. ↑ "The Cambridge University list of members". cam.ac.uk. 1974.
  8. ↑ "The Manchester Mark 1 (Digital 60)". curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  9. ↑ Anon. "Catalogue of historical computer documents donated by Professor D B G Edwards" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 January 2023. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  10. ↑ Lavington, Simon (2012). Alan Turing and His Contemporaries: Building the World's First Computers. BCS, The Chartered Institute. ISBN 9781780171050.
  11. ↑ "Alan Turing Scrapbook – Manchester Computers". turing.org.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  12. 1 2 3 Campbell-Kelly, Martin (1980). "Programming the Mark I: Early Programming Activity at the University of Manchester". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 2 (2): 130–168. doi:10.1109/mahc.1980.10018. ISSN 1058-6180. S2CID 10845153.
  13. 1 2 "Women at the Console". University Histories. 15 March 2019. Archived from the original on 27 June 2022. Retrieved 22 March 2019.
  14. ↑ "HOPL". hopl.info. Archived from the original on 19 December 2018. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  15. ↑ "Alan Turing – Mathematician, war time code breaker, pioneer of computer science and in charge of Hut 8". 1stassociated.co.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  16. ↑ "Turing Manual". curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  17. 1 2 "Women at the console". Alan Turing's Manchester. Retrieved 18 January 2021.
  18. ↑ "The Rutherford Journal – The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology". rutherfordjournal.org. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  19. ↑ "Full text of "A history of Manchester computers (book)"". archive.org. 1975. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  20. ↑ Swinton, Jonathan (2019). Alan Turing's Manchester. Manchester: Infang Publishing. p. 119. ISBN 978-0-9931789-2-4.
  21. 1 2 Berdichevsky, Cecilia (2006), "The Beginning of Computer Science in Argentina — Clementina – (1961–1966)", History of Computing and Education 2 (HCE2), IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, vol. 215, Springer US, pp. 203–215, doi:10.1007/978-0-387-34741-7_15, ISBN 9780387346373
  22. ↑ Impagliazzo, John (27 July 2006). History of Computing and Education 2 (HCE2): IFIP 19th World Computer Congress, WG 9.7, TC 9: History of Computing, Proceedings of the Second Conference on the History of Computing and Education, August 21–24, Santiago, Chile. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9780387346373.
  23. ↑ Leal, Luis Germán Rodríguez; Carnota, Raúl (1 November 2015). Historias de las TIC en América Latina y el Caribe: Inicios, desarrollos y rupturas (in Spanish). Fundación Telefónica. ISBN 9789802715282.
  24. ↑ Carnota, Raul Jorge (2015). "The Beginning of Computer Science in Argentina and the Calculus Institute, 1957-1970". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 37 (4): 40–52. doi:10.1109/mahc.2015.34. ISSN 1058-6180. S2CID 16163838.
  25. ↑ "Information Processing 1962: Amazon.co.uk: Cicely M Popplewell: Books". amazon.co.uk. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  26. ↑ "Alan Turing's Manchester". The Portico Library. Archived from the original on 22 March 2019. Retrieved 22 March 2019.
  27. ↑ "Ancestry – Sign In". ancestry.com. Retrieved 19 December 2018.
  28. ↑ "Deaths". The Daily Telegraph. 23 June 1995. p. 28. ISSN 0307-1235. OCLC 1081089956. Retrieved 31 August 2023 – via Newspapers.com.
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