Kathleen Hylda Valerie Booth (nee Britten, 1922-2022) was a British mathematician and computer scientist who, with Andrew Booth, built a series of early computers at Birkbeck College, University of London: the ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator), the SEC (Simple Electronic Computer), and the APE(X)C. According to the University of St Andrews’ MacTutor biography, she is credited with writing the first assembly language, the human-readable notation that let programmers write instructions in symbols rather than raw binary machine code.
In 1947 she travelled with Andrew Booth to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where the pair wrote influential reports including “General Considerations in the Design of an All Purpose Electronic Digital Computer” and “Coding for the A.R.C.” Her “Contracted Notation” in those reports was an early step toward abstracting programming away from explicit ones and zeros.
Booth’s relevance to AI runs through language. In 1955 she directed an early public demonstration of computer-based translation, and in the late 1950s she conducted early pattern-recognition and neural-network experiments. She lived to 100, dying in 2022. Her assembly language sits at the base of the software tooling that every later AI system was built with, and her translation work prefigured the natural-language processing that defines much of modern AI.