Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli
Early Life and Education
Kathleen Rita McNulty was born in the small village of Creeslough in the County Donegal, Ireland in 1921. During her college years she was heavily involved in mathematics , enrolling in various courses such as spherical trigonometry, differential calculus, projective geometry, partial differential equations, and statistics alongside accounting, money and banking, business law and economics. She graduated with a degree in mathematics in June 1942 as one of only a few mathematics majors out of a class of 92 women.
During World War II, the US Army was actively hiring women with degrees in mathematics to calculate bullet and missile trajectories at The Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland. McNulty along with her fellow math major, Frances Bilas applied and were both hired as human "computers". They were notified to report to work at the Moore School of Engineering. Their job involved computing ballistics trajectories used for artillery firing tables, mostly using mechanical desk calculators and extremely large sheets of columned paper.
Despite all their coursework, their mathematics training had not prepared Kathleen and Frances for their work calculating trajectories for firing tables; both being unfamiliar with numerical integration methods used to compute the trajectories. Fortunately they learned how to perform the steps of their calculations through practice and the advisement of a well-liked supervisor, Lila Todd.
ENIAC Career
The ENIAC was developed for the purpose of performing these same ballistics calculations between 1943–1946. In June 1945, Kathleen was selected to be one of its first programmers, along with several other women from the computer corps where they received further training. It was the women's responsibility to determine the sequence of steps required to complete the calculations for each problem and set up the ENIAC accordingly. Because the ENIAC was a classified project, the programmers were not at first allowed into the room to see the machine, but were given access to blueprints from which to work out programs in an adjacent room. Afterward, having devised a program on paper, the women were allowed into the ENIAC room to physically program the machine.
Later life and achievements
In mid 1947, Kay McNulty was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground's Ballistics Research Laboratory along with the ENIAC. She married ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly in 1948, who had since departed his post as a professor to found his own computer company and later worked on the software design for later computers including the BINAC and UNIVAC I computers whose hardware was designed by her husband. After the death of her husband in 1980 she married photographer Severo Antonelli in 1985 who later died in 1996. She was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997 along with the other original ENIAC programmers, and she accepted the induction of John Mauchly into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio in 2002. She died at the age of 85 in 2006.
Information adapted from:
Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Antonelli [cited 12 April 2015]
Kathleen Rita McNulty was born in the small village of Creeslough in the County Donegal, Ireland in 1921. During her college years she was heavily involved in mathematics , enrolling in various courses such as spherical trigonometry, differential calculus, projective geometry, partial differential equations, and statistics alongside accounting, money and banking, business law and economics. She graduated with a degree in mathematics in June 1942 as one of only a few mathematics majors out of a class of 92 women.
During World War II, the US Army was actively hiring women with degrees in mathematics to calculate bullet and missile trajectories at The Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland. McNulty along with her fellow math major, Frances Bilas applied and were both hired as human "computers". They were notified to report to work at the Moore School of Engineering. Their job involved computing ballistics trajectories used for artillery firing tables, mostly using mechanical desk calculators and extremely large sheets of columned paper.
Despite all their coursework, their mathematics training had not prepared Kathleen and Frances for their work calculating trajectories for firing tables; both being unfamiliar with numerical integration methods used to compute the trajectories. Fortunately they learned how to perform the steps of their calculations through practice and the advisement of a well-liked supervisor, Lila Todd.
ENIAC Career
The ENIAC was developed for the purpose of performing these same ballistics calculations between 1943–1946. In June 1945, Kathleen was selected to be one of its first programmers, along with several other women from the computer corps where they received further training. It was the women's responsibility to determine the sequence of steps required to complete the calculations for each problem and set up the ENIAC accordingly. Because the ENIAC was a classified project, the programmers were not at first allowed into the room to see the machine, but were given access to blueprints from which to work out programs in an adjacent room. Afterward, having devised a program on paper, the women were allowed into the ENIAC room to physically program the machine.
Later life and achievements
In mid 1947, Kay McNulty was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground's Ballistics Research Laboratory along with the ENIAC. She married ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly in 1948, who had since departed his post as a professor to found his own computer company and later worked on the software design for later computers including the BINAC and UNIVAC I computers whose hardware was designed by her husband. After the death of her husband in 1980 she married photographer Severo Antonelli in 1985 who later died in 1996. She was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997 along with the other original ENIAC programmers, and she accepted the induction of John Mauchly into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio in 2002. She died at the age of 85 in 2006.
Information adapted from:
Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Antonelli [cited 12 April 2015]