Audrey Bates (programmer)


Marjorie Audrey Bates was a British-American computer programmer who, in 1948, wrote the earliest program for lambda calculus calculations on the Manchester Mark I computer.

Career

Bates graduated with a First in Mathematics from University of Manchester in the summer of 1949. She was taken on as a research student by Alan Turing, and shared an office with him and Cicely Popplewell. In 1950 Bates submitted an MSc thesis entitled "The mechanical solution of a problem in Church's Lambda calculus". This thesis documents a successful attempt to carry out higher-order logical reasoning on the extremely primitive Manchester Mark I electronic computer.
When the Manchester Mark I was commercialised by the local electronics firm Ferranti, Bates moved to work with them as a programmer. Whilst at Ferranti she composed several sections of Vivian Bowdon's Faster Than Thought, a popular introduction to electronic computing.
In 1952, Bates went to work on the FERUT, the Ferranti Mark I installed at the University of Toronto. In 1955, Bates was pictured supervising the FERUT when it carried out the first automated remote access to a computer.
In 1979, Bates was working as a 'futurist' at a US military think tank.

Personal life

Bates married twice and had four children. Her first husband, Ken Wills, was a fellow Ferranti programmer; her second husband was Leigh Clayton and it was under the name of Clayton that Bates published her later work.