Ellen Cole Fetter Gille is an American computer scientist. She worked with Edward Norton Lorenz on chaos theory.

Early life and education

Fetter was born to Frank Whitson Fetter and Elizabeth Garrett Pollard. Her mother created an endowment for chamber music at Swarthmore College, which has been supported by successive generations of her family. Fetter attended the Ecole Préalpina in Chexbres, Switzerland and New Trier High School, from which she graduated in 1957. She studied mathematics at Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1961.

Career

In 1961, Fetter interviewed with a member of the team who used a

LGP-30 The LGP-30, standing for Librascope General Purpose and then Librascope General Precision, was an early off-the-shelf computer. It was manufactured by the Librascope company of Glendale, California (a division of General Precision Inc.), and s ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

's Department of Nuclear Engineering, who recommended her to Margaret Hamilton. Hamilton soon moved on to another project, and Fetter took over the computational work for

Edward Lorenz Edward Norton Lorenz (May 23, 1917 – April 16, 2008) was an American mathematician and meteorologist who established the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability, as well as the basis for computer-aided atmospheric physics and ...

's research, plotting the motion of a particle experiencing fast convection in an idealised beaker. The work was the foundation of chaos theory. Fetter's contribution was acknowledged by Lorenz ‘Special thanks are due to Miss Ellen Fetter for handling the many numerical computations’ in his frequently referenced paper. In 1963, Fetter married John Gille, who was studying

geophysics Geophysics () is a subject of natural science concerned with the physical processes and physical properties of the Earth and its surrounding space environment, and the use of quantitative methods for their analysis. The term ''geophysics'' so ...

at MIT. They moved to Florida State University, where she worked on programming for several years. In the 1970s, she and her husband moved to Colorado, where Gille is now a senior scientist emeritus at the

National Center for Atmospheric Research The US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR ) is a US federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and funded by the National Science Foundatio ...

. Fetter took computer science classes at the

University of Colorado Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sy ...

, but soon left to work in tax preparation. Fetter's daughter, Sarah Gille, studied physics at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

. She now works in physical oceanography at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is t ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fetter, Ellen American computer scientists American women computer scientists Mount Holyoke College alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Living people Year of birth missing (living people) New Trier High School alumni American women academics 21st-century American women