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 artillery firing tables for the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory — first 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 stayed with the project through ENIAC's move to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, programming the machine's new stored-program configuration — then left computing in 1947 to marry, 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 2001 — one of 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.