Diff — Marlyn Wescoff

**Marlyn Wescoff** — born **Marlyn Wescoff** (1922 – 4 December 2008), later **Meltzer** — was an American mathematician and one of the six original programmers of ENIAC.

# Life

Wescoff graduated from **Temple University** in 1942 with a mathematics degree and, like the others, went to work computing for the Army — weather calculations under John Mauchly's group at first, then artillery firing tables — in Philadelphia. She volunteered for the secret machine project that turned out to be ENIAC, working on its left-side digit trays and the program that would become its public demonstration.

# ENIAC and after

Wescoff's specialty was the machine's trickiest physical domain: the panels that had to be cabled just so for a trajectory to run. She married **Philip Meltzer** in February 1947 and left the project before ENIAC's relocation to the Aberdeen Proving Ground — at a time when marriage generally ended a woman's technical career by custom if not by rule.

Her second career was uncommonly dramatic: decades later, in her seventies, she entered rabbinical school and was **ordained a Reform rabbi in her late seventies** (c. 2001) — among the oldest people ever ordained. She died in 2008.

# Legacy

- Inducted into the **Women in Technology International Hall of Fame** (1997) with the other five ENIAC programmers.

- Her life reads as two complete stories — founding programmer, then rabbi — joined by the fact that almost no one knew about the first until her last decade.

# See also

- [[The first programmers]]

- [[History of Programming]]

# References

4. *Honeywell v. Sperry Rand*, 180 U.S.P.Q. 673 (D. Minn. 1973) — the ENIAC patent trial.

[[Category:History]]

[[Category:People]]