Kathleen Booth - One of the first female computer scientist

Kathleen Booth is a computer scientist known for her work in assembly language and computer architecture. She was born in the UK and received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of London. In 1949, she emigrated to the United States and earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.

In the 1950s, Booth developed the first assembly language, a low-level programming language that allows a programmer to write instructions that the computer can understand. This assembly language, Autocode, was one of the first high-level programming languages and greatly simplified the process of programming computers. She has also significantly contributed to natural language processing, particularly in computer language and machine translation.

Booth began her career in the 1950s and was one of the first computer scientists to work on assembly language. She developed several assembly language compilers and contributed to developing the first assembly language programming manual. She also contributed significantly to machine translation, developing algorithms and software for translating natural language text.

Her husband, Andrew Booth, was also a British computer scientist who contributed significantly to computer science, particularly in assembly language and machine translation. He was born in London in 1921 and received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of London in 1951. He worked at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK, where he began his research in computer science.

His most notable contribution was his work on assembly language. He developed the concept of the "symbolic assembler," which allowed programmers to use mnemonics (memory aids) instead of machine code to write programs. This made it much easier for programmers to write and understand assembly language programs, and the concept is still in use today.

Andrew and Kathleen also made significant contributions to the field of machine translation. Kathleen and Andrew worked on the same team. She wrote the computer code, and he built the machines. They led a team at NPL that developed a machine translation system called the "Geoffrey" translator. The system could translate scientific and technical text between English, Russian, and German. This was one of the earliest machine translation systems and was a significant step forward in Natural Language Processing.

After the Geoffrey translator, Natural Language Processing was added to the Booths' list of projects in 1947. Not literary excellence, but the exact technical translation was the aim. They describe some of the algorithms they and their colleagues developed up to 1965 in their book Automatic Digital Calculators, beginning with word substitutions and analysis of stems and syllable endings. Although they worked extensively on NLP with their team at Birkbeck College, they are also known to have worked on English-French translations.

One of the earliest programming books written by a woman was Programming for an Automatic Digital Calculator by Kathleen Booth, published in 1958.