Ruth A. Weiss
BornMarch 30, 1945
Willesden, Middlesex, England
NationalityBritish
CitizenshipUnited States
OccupationSoftware engineer
Years active1956 – unknown
Known forPioneering work in computer graphics

Ruth A. Weiss is a British-American software engineer known for her work[1] in computer graphics, especially the hidden-line removal problem. She also developed, together with Richard Hamming, the L2 programming language, a floating-point mathematical package for the IBM 650.

Early life

Weiss was born in Willesden, Middlesex, England (now part of the Greater London area) on March 30, 1945.[2] She arrived in the United States on November 13, 1952, with her mother, Margaret Weiss (Marliese Oppá or Oppe), and her two brothers and maternal grandmother on the French ocean liner Ile de France, which sailed from Southampton on November 7, 1952.[3] Her father, Paul Weiss, a noted British mathematician of German descent, had already arrived in the U.S. in September 1950[3] and was living in Syracuse, NY. Weiss was naturalized a U.S. citizen on April 28, 1964.[4][failed verification]

Career and accomplishments

While working for Bell Labs in the 1950s and 1960s, Weiss co-developed, with Richard Hamming, the L2 interpretive floating point package. The L2 system was widely used within Bell Labs, and also by outside users, who knew it as Bell 2. It was superseded by Fortran when the IBM 650 was replaced by the IBM 704 in 1957.[5][6][7] At Bell Labs she also worked on development of the Multics operating system.[8]

Weiss's 1966 paper[9] on her BE VISION software for the IBM 7090 describes hidden-line removal in curved surfaces, a challenging problem at the time. This paper was acknowledged by inclusion in a 1998 compilation by SIGGRAPH of the seminal papers in computer graphics. According to Carlson,[10] "Ruth Weiss created in 1964 (published in 1966) some of the first algorithms for converting equations of surfaces to orthographic views on an output device." In a 1966 paper,[11] Ivan E. Sutherland stated that the problem of hidden-line removal remained unsolved for surfaces other than planes. Two months later, Weiss corrected him in a letter[12] to the same publication, citing her work in hidden-line removal in quadric surfaces.[9]

References

  1. ^ Rickles, Dean; Blum, Alexander (October 6, 2015). "Paul Weiss and the genesis of canonical quantization". European Physical Journal H. 40 (4–5): 469–487. Bibcode:2015EPJH...40..469R. doi:10.1140/epjh/e2015-60001-5.
  2. ^ Birth Registration, Willesden, Middlesex, England; General Register Office, Southport, England; Line 113, Vol. 3A
  3. ^ a b Immigration, New York City, New York, United States, NARA microfilm publication T715 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.)
  4. ^ Ruth Elizabeth Weiss, Naturalization Petition and Record, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, Detroit, Certificate No. 8637552, Issued April 28, 1964
  5. ^ Holbrook, Bernard D.; Brown, W. Stanley. "Computing Science Technical Report No. 99 – A History of Computing Research at Bell Laboratories (1937–1975)". Bell Labs. Archived from the original on September 2, 2014. Retrieved September 2, 2014.
  6. ^ Bell L2 Interpreter at the Wayback Machine (archived July 21, 2005)
  7. ^ Kaisler, Stephen (2017). Birthing the Computer: from drums to cores. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 20. ISBN 1443885118.
  8. ^ "Multics System Programmer's Manual". Archived from the original on March 28, 2006. Retrieved September 2, 2020.
  9. ^ a b Ruth A. Weiss BE VISION, A Package of IBM 7090 FORTRAN Programs to Draw Orthographic Views of Combinations of Plane and Quadric Surfaces
  10. ^ Wayne E. Carlson Computer Graphics and Computer Animation: A Retrospective Overview
  11. ^ I. E. Sutherland. Ten unsolved problems in computer graphics. Datamation, 12(5):22–27, 1966.
  12. ^ Ruth A. Weiss. Letters. Datamation, 12(8):12, 1966.
Categories