Margaret K. Butler
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Margaret Kampschaefer Butler | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 27, 1924 |
| Died | March 8, 2013 (aged 88) |
| Occupation | Mathematician |
Margaret Kampschaefer Butler (March 27, 1924 – March 8, 2013) was a mathematician who participated in creating and updating computer software. During the early 1950s, Butler contributed to the development of early computers. Butler was the first female fellow at the American Nuclear Society and director of the National Energy Software Center at Argonne. Butler held leadership positions within multiple scientific organizations and women's groups.[1] She was the creator and director of the National Energy Software Center. Here, Butler operated an exchange for the editing of computer programs in regards to nuclear power and developed early principles for computer technology.[2]
Margaret Kampschaefer was born on March 27, 1924, in Evansville, Indiana,[3] the middle child of three daughters born to Lou Etta and Otto Kampschaefer. Her father was a Mechanical Engineer graduate of Purdue University and her mother was a business school graduate who had worked as a bookkeeper before the children were born, remaining active in a business women's club, and sometimes covered club members work while they took holidays. The children were brought up with the expectation that they would go to college.[4] Margaret Kampschaefer studied statistics and differential calculus at Indiana University Bloomington, having discovered the joy of mathematical accuracy during her undergraduate courses. She graduated in 1944.[5]
Career
Margaret Kampschaefer began her career in 1944 working as a statistician at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.[6] While she worked there, she also taught math at the United States Department of Agriculture Graduate School and took graduate courses related to sampling theory.[6]
About a year later, she joined the United States Army Air Forces and worked as a civilian in Germany.[6] She returned to the United States after two years and began working in the Naval Reactors Division of Argonne National Laboratory as a junior mathematician.[6]
While working at Argonne, Butler made calculations for physicists creating a prototype for a submarine reactor and attended atomic physics and reactor design classes.[7] In 1949, she worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Minnesota but returned to Argonne National Laboratory in 1951.[7] Following her return to Argonne, Butler became an assistant mathematician in the Reactor Engineering Division and worked on AVIDAC, an early computer.[6] Following marriage in 1951, she became known as Margaret Butler. In the 1950s she wrote software, reactor applications, mathematical subroutines, and utilities for three other Argonne computers, the ORACLE, GEORGE, and UNIVAC.[7]
Butler led Argonne's Applied Mathematics Division's Application Programming from 1959 to 1965. While working in this department, she developed teams to fix program problems in reactors, biology, chemistry, physics, management, and high energy physics applications.[7] In 1960, she worked with others to establish the Argonne Code Center, which later became the National Energy Software Center (NESC).[7] Butler would later become director of the NESC from 1972–1991.[7]
She became the first woman to be named fellow of the American Nuclear Society in 1972, following her nomination a year earlier. She was also a consultant to the European Nuclear Energy Agency during the time it was establishing its computer program.[5]
In 1980, Butler was promoted to Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne. She officially retired in 1991, but continued to work at Argonne from 1993 to 2006 as a "special term appointee".[7]