Fonds F1390 - Beatrice Worsley fonds

Beatrice Helen Worsley was born on October 18, 1922 in Mexico. She attended the University of Toronto, from 1940-1944, where she earned a B.A. with first class honours in Mathematics and Physics. Between 1946 and 1947 she attained an S.M. in Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studied at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, England from 1948-1950 and achieved a Phd.D. (Cambridge) in mathematics in 1952. During World War II Dr. Worsley served with the Canadian Navy where she was involved in designing torpedoes equipped with rudimentary computers. From 1951 to 1965 she was employed by the University of Toronto where she became an associate professor of computer science. Dr. Worsley came to Queen's in 1965 where she was a founding member of the Queen's Computing Centre and developed early courses offered by the centre. In 1969 the new Department of Computing and Information Science was established at Queen's. Dr. Worsley received a cross appointment to the new department and worked on course and curriculum proposals for both undergraduate and graduate programs. An active member of both the Canadian Information Processing Society and the Computer Science Association she helped co-ordinate the functional merger of the two. During her professional career Dr. B.H. Worsley produced some seventeen technical papers for a number of learned journals and at least as many other articles on topics relating to her work. Dr. Worsley died, on May 8, 1972, of a heart attack while on a sabbatical leave at the University of Waterloo.