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Adele Goldstine (1920–1964)

Basic Facts

  • Full name: Adele Katz Goldstine (nee Katz)
  • Born: 21 December 1920, New York City
  • Died: November 1964 (exact date not recorded in most sources), age 43
  • Cause of death: Cancer (diagnosed 1962)

Family Background

Born to Yiddish-speaking Jewish parents in New York City. Her father, William Katz, emigrated from Lithuania in 1902.

Education

  • High school: Hunter College High School, New York City
  • B.A.: Hunter College
  • M.A.: Mathematics, University of Michigan (completed at age 22)

Career

Moore School Instructor and ENIAC Trainer

After her marriage to Herman Goldstine in 1941 (they met at the University of Michigan), Adele followed him to the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. She worked as an instructor of mathematics for the women “computers” – the human calculators who computed ballistic trajectories using desk calculators and mechanical devices.

When the Army selected six women to program ENIAC, it was Adele Goldstine who trained them. She taught Kay McNulty, Betty Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman to manually calculate ballistic trajectories – the complex differential calculations that ENIAC was designed to automate. She served as their mathematical mentor and the bridge between the machine’s engineering and its programmers.

The ENIAC Technical Manual

In the summer of 1946, Adele Goldstine wrote the first technical description and operator’s manual for ENIAC – the definitive document for the first electronic digital computer. She based the manual on the programming work pioneered by the six women programmers. For years after ENIAC was developed, this remained the only formal technical manual for the machine.

The 1948 Stored-Program Conversion

Adele Goldstine was instrumental in converting ENIAC from a machine that required physical rewiring for each new problem to one capable of performing a set of fifty stored instructions. In 1946, she collaborated with Jean Bartik and Dick Clippinger on programming sessions aimed at implementing a stored-program modification. John von Neumann served as a consultant on this effort. The goal was to save the programmers from having to repeatedly plug and unplug patch cables for every new computation.

Building on plans developed by Adele Goldstine and others, in April 1948 Nick Metropolis completed the conversion – making ENIAC the first computer to execute programs written in the stored-program paradigm that von Neumann had described in his 1945 “First Draft.”

Los Alamos Work

After the war, Adele continued programming at Los Alamos National Laboratory, working with John von Neumann to devise computational problems for ENIAC processing.

Personal Life

  • Married Herman Goldstine in 1941. They had two children (born 1952 and 1959).
  • Diagnosed with cancer in 1962.
  • Died in November 1964, at age 43.

Legacy

Adele Goldstine occupies a unique position in computing history: she was simultaneously a trainer, a technical writer, a programmer, and an architect of the stored-program conversion. Her ENIAC manual was the first of its kind. Yet she remains far less known than her husband Herman or his colleague John von Neumann. Her early death at 43 cut short a career that had already produced foundational contributions.

Connections to Others in the Story

  • Herman Goldstine: Husband; Army liaison to ENIAC, later director of IAS computer project.
  • The six ENIAC programmers: Kay McNulty, Betty Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, Ruth Lichterman – she trained them all.
  • John von Neumann: Consulted on the stored-program conversion; Adele worked with him at Los Alamos.
  • Jean Bartik: Collaborated on the stored-program conversion in 1946–1948.
  • John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert: Designers of the ENIAC that Adele documented and helped reprogram.

Sources