Mathematics was the subject I was best at ... a much more pleasant thing to do than studying languages, for instance.

Much interest had been shown recently in sandwich construction as practical and theoretical investigations have indicated that sandwich panels can be equally or more efficient than the more conventional stringer and corrugated panels for carrying end loads.

This report describes tests made on 56 flat Dural-Celluboard panels with birch, spruce and whitewood centres, and compares the results with those obtained from Dural-Balsa and all-metal panels.

... used to say that, in an odd way, the war did her a favour. It opened science-based jobs to women who had previously been limited to teaching.

When they arrived they found that actually very little was going on by way of computer construction but there was a lot of theory to absorb - in particular von Neumann architecture.

In the first paper of this series [by Andrew Booth], the effect of experimental errors in the Fourier coefficients, upon the derived atomic co-ordinates was investigated. The assumption was made that the probable errors were independent of the magnitudes of their parent Bragg reflexions.

It has been suggested that a more accurate assumption would be to take the probable error of any coefficient as being proportional to the magnitude of that coefficient. The present paper develops the theory on this basis, and a solution in closed form is obtained.

The question of how the experimental error in the co-ordinates varies with the position of the atom in relation to its neighbours is also investigated, and it is shown that the variation is much smaller than that previously derived for finite summation errors.

It meant quite hard work. No weekends off or gadding around. But I didn't mind. I was enjoying it.

The construction of their first electronic computer, called SEC (Simple Electronic Computer), was completed around 1950. Andrew wrote up the project in his MSc dissertation, which appears to make him the first computing graduate at Birkbeck and hence the Department's earliest alumnus.

The couple's best-known machine, APEC (All-Purpose Electronic Computer), was designed in 1949. In 1951, the British Tabulating Machine Company used its hardware circuits as the basis of the design of their HEC1 (Hollerith Electronic Computer) computer, which evolved directly by the end of the 1950s into the bestselling British computer, with a total of nearly 100 machines installed.
...
From the start, Kathleen was closely involved in the building and testing of the computers that Andrew designed. Getting these early machines to work involved a combination of testing the electronics and then checking that the programmes executed correctly.

This book is an introduction to the design, construction, and use of automatic digital computers. In the early chapters the historical development of digital computers is described and an account given of the logical design of a computer and its main components. The engineering devices which have been or may be used for the construction of these components are discussed in more detail in Chapters 8-12. The last part of the book is devoted to an introduction to the use of machines and to the problems of coding. Some examples of programming with the two-address code of APEXC both with and without optimum coding are worked. The final chapter gives an outline of some of the less common applications of automatic computers. A classified and cross-referenced bibliography is included before name and subject indices.

... that the Foundation was unlikely to fund a machine at London for numerical work but that a submission indicating interest in Machine Translation would be well received. This was duly submitted and was successful.

C'est un exemple d'une traduction fait par la machine à calculer installée au laboratoire de Calcul de Birkbeck College, Londres.

This is an example of a translation made by the machine for calculation installed at the laboratory of computation of Birkbeck College, London.

The years since the second World War have seen a remarkable change in the field of calculation brought about by the availability, in rapidly increasing numbers, of electronic computing machines has meant the emergence of the new technique of preparing calculations for these machines, usually known as programming. The process of organising a calculation can be divided into two parts - the mathematical formulation and the actual programming. The first of these may involve such things as the choice of a suitable finite difference relationship to replace the continuous processes of differentiation and integration, the representation of an analytic function by a power series and the estimation of errors involved in the calculation. The second consists of translating the results of the mathematical formulation into the language of the computing machine, its order code. Obviously the first stage of preparation may involve a considerable knowledge of mathematics but although both parts are often done by the same person - usually a mathematician - in fact the technique of programming can be acquired by anyone with a capacity for accurate detailed thinking, and a talent for solving puzzles. Moreover, it has been our experience that it is possible to train people to do useful programming in a matter of two weeks, although the acquiring of the more subtle tricks of the trade naturally takes longer.

The College Annual Report of 1958/59, in a foretaste of much more recent work, reports Dr Kathleen Booth developing a program to simulate a neural network to investigate ways in which animals recognise patterns. The following year reports a neural network for character recognition.

I had made several attempts to get the University to create a permanent Chair in Computer Science and even obtained a guarantee of funds from Industrial friends to support it. It was rejected on the grounds that "It is too soon to see if computer science will have a long term existence!" It must be said however that this may have been due to the malice of another academic at another University. I learned of this much later along with evidence of his complete dishonesty.

In retrospect this was a massive loss to the College and, from today's perspective, totally incomprehensible given his key contributions to computer technology and his huge research output.

When the 2nd International Conference of Women in Engineering and Science was held in 1967, Kathleen represented Canada and undertook a survey of the attitudes towards women in engineering at the time.

The author of this article, having worked in the mathematical field for nearly twenty years in a variety of posts in England, came to Canada nearly five years ago, and for most of the time since then has been employed in a teaching and research post in the University of Saskatchewan. This is not intended to be the autobiography of a Pioneer on the Prairies, but one must remark here on the extreme friendliness and cooperation of Canadians at all levels to the newcomer which makes the process of transplantation much more agreeable than might appear.

She was really modest. She didn't say anything about her past contributions to the development of computers. It was only in later years that I came to know what achievements she and her husband had made in their careers just after the Second World War and through the 50s. They were really, really innovators, but we never knew that.

By the time I left Saskatoon in 1972 I had a reasonably qualified staff and a graduate school enrolment of about 300. This was the fourth largest in Canada. On the side our work on Movable Type had continued under the supervision of Dr Kathleen Booth and our system had been demonstrated to the Queen's Printer.

... acoustic signal processing, aquaculture, back propagation, bioacoustics, biological techniques and instruments, biology computing, feedforward neural nets, geophysics computing, oceanographic techniques, speech recognition, underwater sound, zoology.

A software neural net model to recognise the calls of individual seals has been constructed and has been shown to perform satisfactorily with all of the mammals in the available set. It has also proved stable in the presence of both man made and natural noise. Operating and conditioning times on typical computers are provided.

She was a keen vegetable grower, taking produce long to the annual autumn fair, and her garden had more than 60 varieties of wild flowers. Before the onset of mobility issues she and her husband enjoyed hiking and walking. She continued to follow developments in computing and 18 months ago, approaching her 99th birthday, used an iPad to record her memories.

What she was doing, she was doing before there was an industry, before there was an academic field. They were really early pioneers. ... Without assembly language, I think computers would have been much less widely accepted. Assembly languages were the first way that normal people like us were able to start using computers. ... Andrew was a very outgoing figure … where Kathleen was very quiet and kind of worked in the background. So it doesn't surprise me at all that a lot of the credit for their joint accomplishments is given to Andrew. But they would admit they worked together constantly.

... fully-funded PhD studentship, which recognises the contribution of pioneering computer scientist Dr Kathleen Booth, [it] is made possible with support from Google. ... Professor George Roussos, Head of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, said: "We are delighted to offer the Kathleen Booth Anniversary PhD Studentship in Computer Science with support from Google to celebrate Kathleen's contributions and achievements as one of the earliest women computer science pioneers. This award reaffirms our commitment to offer career development opportunities for women in a still highly gender-imbalanced discipline."