Ruth Lichterman
Ruth Lichterman — born Ruth Lichterman (1924 – 9 August 1986), later Teitelbaum — was an American mathematician and one of the six original programmers of ENIAC.
Life
Lichterman graduated from Hunter College with a bachelor's in mathematics in 1942 and joined the Army's human-computer corps in Philadelphia, computing firing tables — the work that made the war's artillery accurate and its computers' hands numb. She volunteered for the secret project that became ENIAC.
ENIAC and after
Lichterman's specialty was the mathematics itself: while the others mastered wiring and timing, she mapped the ballistic equations onto the machine's accumulators — the translation step between physics and hardware that is the essence of programming. When ENIAC moved from Philadelphia to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in 1947, she went with it — and then took on the task that multiplied the six's work: teaching ENIAC's next generation of programmers, turning hard-won knowledge into transferable practice.
She married in 1948, moved to Texas, and left computing — as the era's customs dictated. She died in Dallas in 1986, years before the group's recognition began.
Legacy
- Inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame (1997) with the other five — the only one who did not live to accept it.
- The programmers she trained at Aberdeen carried the six's methods forward — documentation and teaching, invented alongside programming itself.
See also
References
- Kleiman, Kathy. Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World's First Modern Computer (Grand Central, 2022).
- Haigh, Thomas, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope. ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer (MIT Press, 2016).
- Evans, Claire L. Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (Portfolio, 2018).
- Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, 180 U.S.P.Q. 673 (D. Minn. 1973) — the ENIAC patent trial.