Kateryna Yushchenko
Kateryna Lohvynivna Yushchenko (Ukrainian: Катерина Логвинівна Ющенко, née Rvacheva; 8 December 1919 – 15 August 2001) was a Ukrainian computer scientist who created the Address programming language in 1955 — one of the world's first high-level programming languages and the first to implement indirect addressing of higher ranks: what every programmer today calls pointers. Over forty years she founded and led the Soviet school of theoretical programming, supervised 47 doctoral students, and became the first woman in the USSR to earn a Doctorate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in programming.[1]
Life
Born in Chyhyryn, central Ukraine, she began at Kyiv University in 1937. The war interrupted everything — she finished her degree in exile at Central Asian State University in Tashkent in 1942. Her husband, the writer Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, was arrested as an "enemy of the people"; Ukrainian accounts record that she was expelled from the Komsomol for refusing to denounce him, and later reinstated.[2]
After the war she returned to Kyiv, took her PhD in 1950 under Boris Gnedenko at the Institute of Mathematics, and spent 1950–57 as senior researcher there — including as a member of the group that operated MESM. Writing machine code for MESM convinced her that raw machine language could not carry the complex tasks being demanded of it; the answer, formalized with help from Kyiv University professor L. I. Kaluzhnin's work on program-interfacing schemes, was the address language of 1955, built with colleague Vladimir Korolyuk on two principles of machine operation: program control and addressing.[3]
In 1957 she became director of the Academy's computer-science institute — part of the computing establishment that ran the Kiev computer and became the Institute of Cybernetics in 1962 — a machine designed partly around her language. Over the following four decades she built what became internationally recognized as the Soviet School of Theoretical Programming, whose later work moved from procedural languages toward algebraic-grammar methods, knowledge representation, and the database/expert-system tooling of the 1980s–90s.[4]
The Address language in brief
- 1955 — created by Yushchenko (with Korolyuk; Kaluzhnin's formalization)
- Two foundations: program control and addressing — including addresses of second and higher ranks
- Free relocation of a program in memory — a feature most languages took decades to acquire
- Implemented on the Kiev, Ural, M-20, Minsk, Dnipro, Promin and essentially all first- and second-generation Soviet machines; in service for nearly twenty years
- Used for aviation, space, machine building, and defense work — including ballistic-missile trajectory calculations
- Western languages only acquired pointers with PL/I (1964)
Her 1963 book Адресное программирование (286 pp) codified the system; the textbook Elements of Programming (with Gnedenko and Korolyuk) appeared in German (1964), Hungarian (1964), and French (1969, Dunod). With Glushkov she wrote the 1962 mathematical description of the Kiev computer — translated by the US Air Force in 1966.[5]
Recognition
Corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1976) · member of the International Academy of Computer Science · two USSR State Prizes · USSR Council of Ministers Prize · Academician Glushkov Prize · two Orders of Princess Olga · five copyright certificates behind eight Ukrainian state standards · 200+ manuscripts, 23 monographs, translations into five-plus languages.[6]
She died on 15 August 2001, aged 81.
References
- NASU — "Пам'яті К. Л. Ющенко" (2001 memorial bulletin); "винахідниця Pointers" profile
- uacomputing.com — History of Computing in Ukraine, Yushchenko biography
- Yushchenko, Адресное программирование (1963); Gnedenko/Korolyuk/Yushchenko, Elements of Programming
- Glushkov & Yushchenko, The Kiev Computer: A Mathematical Description (1962; FTD trans. 1966)
See also
- Address programming language — her creation
- Kiev computer · MESM · Dnipro computer
- Victor Glushkov · Boris Gnedenko