Beryl May Dent
Beryl May Dent was an English mathematical physicist, technical librarian, and a programmer of early analogue and digital computers to solve electrical engineering problems. She was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of schoolteachers. The family left Chippenham in 1901, after her father became head teacher of the then recently established Warminster County School. In 1923, she graduated from the University of Bristol with First Class Honours in applied mathematics. She was awarded the Ashworth Hallett scholarship by the university and was accepted as a postgraduate student at Newnham College, Cambridge.
She returned to Bristol in 1925, after being appointed a researcher in the Physics Department at the University of Bristol, with her salary being paid by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. In 1927, John Lennard-Jones was appointed Professor of Theoretical physics, a chair being created for him, with Dent becoming his research assistant in theoretical physics. LennardJones pioneered the theory of interatomic and intermolecular forces at Bristol and she became one of his first collaborators. They published six papers together from 1926 to 1928, dealing with the forces between atoms and ions, that were to become the foundation of her master's thesis. Later work has shown that the results they obtained had direct application to atomic force microscopy by predicting that noncontact imaging is possible only at small tipsample separations.
In 1930, she joined Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company Ltd, Manchester, as a technical librarian for the scientific and technical staff of the research department. She became active in the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux and was honorary secretary to the founding committee for the Lancashire and Cheshire branch of the association. She served on various ASLIB committees and made conference presentations detailing different aspects of the company's library and information service. She continued to publish scientific papers, contributing numerical methods for solving differential equations by the use of the differential analyser that was built for the University of Manchester and Douglas Hartree. She was the first to develop a detailed reduced major axis method for the best fit of a series of data points.
Later in her career she became leader of the computation section at MetropolitanVickers, and then a supervisor in the research department for the section that was investigating semiconducting materials. She joined the Women's Engineering Society and published papers on the application of digital computers to electrical design. She retired in 1960, with Isabel Hardwich, later a fellow and president of the Women's Engineering Society, replacing her as section leader for the women in the research department. In 1962, she moved with her mother and sister to Sompting, West Sussex, and died there in 1977.
Early life
Beryl May was born on, at Penley Villa, Park Lane, Chippenham, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of Agnes Dent,, and Eustace Edward. She was baptised at StPaul's, Chippenham, on 8 June 1900. They had married at St Mary's Church, Goosnargh, near Preston, Lancashire, on 27July 1898. Her mother was educated at the Harris Institute, Preston, passing examinations in science and art. She was a teacher at Attercliffe School, in northeast Sheffield, before moving to Goosnargh School, near her hometown of Preston, where her elder brother and sister, John William and Mary Ann Thornley, were the head teachers. In March 1894, she had applied for the headship at Fairfield School, Cockermouth, making the shortlist, but the board decided to appoint a local candidate.On 18March 1889, Dent's father was appointed to a teaching assistant position at Portland Road School, in Halifax, West Yorkshire, after completing a teaching apprenticeship with the school board. In the same year, Florence Emily Dent, his elder sister, was appointed head teacher at West Vale girls' school, Stainland Road, Greetland, moving from the Higher Board School at Halifax. In August 1889, he obtained a first class pass in mathematics from the Halifax Mechanics' Institute. He enrolled on a degree course at University College, Aberystwyth, in the Education Day Training College. In January 1894, he was awarded a first by Aberystwyth, and a first in the external University of London examinations. His first teaching post was at Coopers' Company Grammar School, Bow, London, before moving to Chippenham, where he was a senior assistant teacher at the Chippenham County School.
In October 1901, Dent's father left Chippenham to become head teacher of the then recently established Warminster County School, that adjoined the Athenaeum Theatre in Warminster. The family moved to Boreham Road, Warminster, where houses were built in the early 19th century. In April 1907, they moved to 22Portway, Warminster, situated a short distance from the County School and the Athenaeum. He was elected chair of the Warminster Urban District Council from 1920 to 1922, and remained as head teacher of the County School until his retirement in August 1929.
Dent's father was also a regular cast member of the Warminster Operatic Society at the Athenaeum and other venues. Dent and her younger sister, Florence Mary, would often appear with him on stage in such operettas as Snow White and the seven dwarfs and the Princess JuJu, a Japanese operetta in three acts by Clementine Ward. In Princess JuJu, she played La La, one of the three maidens attendant on the princess, and sang the first act solo, She must be demure. In act two of the same musical, she performed in the fan dance, Spirits of the Night. She also acted in a scene from Tennyson's Princess at the County School's prize giving day on 16December 1913.
Education
Warminster County School (1909–1917)
From 1909, Dent was educated at Warminster County School, where her father was head teacher. At school, she was close friends with her neighbour at Portway, Evelyn Mary Day, the eldest daughter of Henry George Day, a former butler to Colonel Charles Gathorne GathorneHardy, son of Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy, 1st Earl of Cranbrook. In August 1914, she passed the University of Oxford Junior Local Examination with First Class Honours, and on the strength of her examination result, she was awarded a scholarship by the school. In 1915, she passed the senior examination with second class honours and a distinction in French, and subsequently, her scholarship was renewed. She then joined the sixth form and won the school prize for French in December 1916. In March 1918, she applied for a scholarship in mathematics from Somerville College, one of the first two women's colleges in the University of Oxford. She was highly commended but was not awarded a scholarship nor an exhibition.University of Bristol (1919–1923)
In 1918, Dent joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, Hampshire. The First World War opened new employment opportunities for women, and RAE was one of the first military establishments to recruit women into engineering, and mathematical and computational research. In the same period that Dent was at RAE, Lorna Swain, then mathematics tutor at Newnham College in the University of Cambridge, worked at the establishment on the problem of aircraft propeller vibration. The Treasury reduced RAE's funding after the end of the war, and consequently, the number of resources and staff available to support research fell significantly. In 1919, she left RAE after being accepted on to the general Bachelor of Arts degree course at the University of Bristol. In June 1920, she passed her intermediate examination in French with supplementary courses in Latin, history, and mathematics. In July of the same year, she passed first class in the Cambridge Higher Local mathematics examination.In the following academic year, Dent joined the honours course in mathematics and took an intermediate examination in physics. After spending the summer of 1921 at her parents' home in Warminster, she returned for the start of the 1921 to 1922 academic year to find that Paul Dirac had joined the mathematics course. The course of mathematics at Bristol University normally lasted three years, but because of Dirac's previous training, the Department of Mathematics had allowed him to join in the second year. They were taught applied mathematics by Henry Ronald Hassé, the then head of the Mathematics Department, and pure mathematics by Peter Fraser. Both of them had come from Cambridge; Fraser had been appointed in 1906 to the staff of the Bristol University College, soon to become the University of Bristol, and Hassé joined him in 1919 as professor of mathematics. Fraser introduced them to mathematical rigour, projective geometry, and rigorous proofs in differential and integral calculus. Dirac would later say that Peter Fraser was "the best teacher he had ever had."
Dent studied four courses in pure mathematics:
There was a choice of specialisation in the final year; applied or pure mathematics. As the only official, registered feepaying student, Dent had the right to choose, and she settled on applied mathematics for the final year. The department could offer only one set of lectures so Dirac also had to follow the same course. Dent studied four courses in applied mathematics:
File:Newnham College, Cambridge, March 2008.jpg|thumb|alt=Picture of the front and grounds of Newnham College, Cambridge|In 1923, Dent was accepted as a postgraduate research student by at Newnham College, University of Cambridge