Biography:Cicely Popplewell

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Short description: British software engineer
Cicely Williams
Cicely Mary Williams née Popplewell died 1995.jpg
Born
Cicely Mary Popplewell

29 October 1920 (1920-10-29)
Stockport, England
Died1995 (aged 74–75)
Buxton, England
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge (BA, MA)
Known forWork on Manchester Mark 1 and Ferranti Mark 1
Spouse(s)George Keith Williams
Scientific career
FieldsSoftware engineering
InstitutionsUniversity of Manchester
InfluencesAlan Turing

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 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 in 1995 in Buxton, England.

References

  1. ↑ "Ancestry – birth record". https://www.ancestry.co.uk/cs/offers/join?sub=11540774699171840&dbid=8782&url=https%3a%2f%2fsearch.ancestry.co.uk%2fcgi-bin%2fsse.dll%3findiv%3d1%26dbid%3d8782%26h%3d45276073%26ssrc%3dpt%26tid%3d49581436%26pid%3d27776591683%26usePUB%3dtrue%26requr%3d11540774699171840%26ur%3d0&gsfn=&gsln=&h=45276073. 
  2. ↑ "Greaves Hall – The history of Greaves Hall, Banks, Nr Southport". http://www.northmeols.com/history/greaveshall/. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Hodges, Andrew (2014) (in en). Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game – Updated Edition. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9781400865123. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "The Woman Engineer". http://www2.theiet.org/resources/library/archives/research/wes/WES_Vol_5.html. 
  5. ↑ "Interview:David, Mike". http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/technology/atlas50th/p009.htm. 
  6. ↑ @theUL (21 December 2018). "@paulcoxon @message4bob @jesswade @Cambridge_Uni @OfficialUoM @Wikipedia @sim_manchester @WikiWomenInRed…". https://twitter.com/theUL/status/1076092273933340673. 
  7. ↑ "The Cambridge University list of members". 1974. http://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=44CAM_ALMA21347731530003606&context=L&vid=44CAM_PROD&search_scope=SCOP_CAM_ALL&tab=cam_lib_coll&lang=en_US. 
  8. ↑ "The Manchester Mark 1 (Digital 60)". http://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/digital60/www.digital60.org/birth/manchestercomputers/mark1/manchester.html. 
  9. ↑ Anon. "Catalogue of historical computer documents donated by Professor D B G Edwards". http://www.ourcomputerheritage.org/CatE.pdf. 
  10. ↑ Lavington, Simon (2012) (in en). Alan Turing and His Contemporaries: Building the World's First Computers. BCS, The Chartered Institute. ISBN 9781780171050. 
  11. ↑ "Alan Turing Scrapbook – Manchester Computers". https://www.turing.org.uk/scrapbook/manmach.html. 
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 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. 
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Women at the Console" (in en). 2019-03-15. https://universityhistories.com/2019/03/15/women-at-the-console/. 
  14. ↑ "HOPL". http://hopl.info/showlanguage.prx?exp=3914. 
  15. ↑ "Alan Turing – Mathematician, war time code breaker, pioneer of computer science and in charge of Hut 8". http://www.1stassociated.co.uk/regions/alan-turing-article2.asp. 
  16. ↑ "Turing Manual". http://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/computer50/www.computer50.org/kgill/mark1/progman.html. 
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 "Women at the console" (in en-GB). https://www.manturing.net/manufacturing-blog/2019/2/12/women-at-the-console. 
  18. ↑ "The Rutherford Journal – The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology". http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article010109.html. 
  19. ↑ "Full text of "A history of Manchester computers (book)"" (in en). 1975. https://archive.org/stream/HistoryOfManchesterComputers/History%20of%20Manchester%20computers_djvu.txt. 
  20. ↑ Swinton, Jonathan (2019). Alan Turing's Manchester. Manchester: Infang Publishing. pp. 119. ISBN 978-0-9931789-2-4. https://www.manturing.net/manufacturing-blog/2019/2/12/women-at-the-console. 
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 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, 215, Springer US, pp. 203–215, doi:10.1007/978-0-387-34741-7_15, ISBN 9780387346373 
  22. ↑ Impagliazzo, John (2006-07-27) (in en). 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 (2015-11-01) (in es). Historias de las TIC en América Latina y el Caribe: Inicios, desarrollos y rupturas. 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. 
  25. ↑ "Information Processing 1962: Amazon.co.uk: Cicely M Popplewell: Books". https://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Processing-1962-Cicely-Popplewell/dp/B000LZH40S. 
  26. ↑ "Alan Turing's Manchester" (in en-US). https://www.theportico.org.uk/event-calendar/2019/4/15/alan-turings-manchester. 
  27. ↑ "Ancestry – Sign In". https://www.ancestry.com/account/signin?returnUrl=&secRedir=1. 




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