Diff — 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

- [[The first programmers]]

- [[History of Programming]]

[[Category:History]]

[[Category:People]]