Joyce Barbara Friedman (1928 – November 28, 2018) was an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

operations research Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve deci ...

er,

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

, and

computational linguist Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

who worked as a professor at the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

and

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...

and served as president of the

Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proces ...

Early life and education

Friedman was born in 1928. She was a Durant Scholar at

Wellesley College Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficial g ...

, from which she graduated in 1949, and earned a master's degree at

Radcliffe College Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and he ...

in 1952. In the same year she moved from the Logistics Research Project at

George Washington University , mottoeng = "God is Our Trust" , established = , type = Private federally chartered research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $2.8 billion (2022) , preside ...

to the US Department of Defense, later working at a succession of defense contractors: ACF Industries (where she worked with Sheldon Akers on

production scheduling Scheduling is the process of arranging, controlling and optimizing work and workloads in a production process or manufacturing process. Scheduling is used to allocate plant and machinery resources, plan human resources, plan production processes an ...

), Tech. Operations, Inc., and the Mitre Corporation. Returning to graduate study at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, her interests shifted from

automated reasoning In computer science, in particular in knowledge representation and reasoning and metalogic, the area of automated reasoning is dedicated to understanding different aspects of reasoning. The study of automated reasoning helps produce computer progra ...

. She completed her Ph.D. in 1965, supervised by Hao Wang, with the dissertation ''A New Decision Procedure in Logic with a Computer Realization'', concerning computational methods in

first-order logic First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...

Academic career and later life

Friedman worked as an assistant professor at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

from 1965 until 1968, when she moved to the

as an associate professor of computer and communications sciences. At Michigan, she was promoted to full professor in 1971. She moved to

as chair of computer science in 1983. Even before completing her doctorate, Friedman had worked at Mitre as a programmer for Donald E. Walker on a project for the US Air Force involving the development of programs that could answer English-language questions. As an academic, her research largely concentrated on

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...

and

formal grammar In formal language theory, a grammar (when the context is not given, often called a formal grammar for clarity) describes how to form strings from a language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe ...

s; she served as president of the

in 1971. Some of her work on

transformational grammar In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combin ...

was described in her 1971 book, ''A Computational Model of Transformational Grammar''. She has over 180 academic descendants through three of her doctoral students: C. Raymond Perrault,

Remko Scha Remko Jan Hendrik Scha (15 September 1945 – 9 November 2015) was a professor of computational linguistics at the faculty of humanities and Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. He made important contributio ...

, and David S. Warren. She died on November 28, 2018 in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

Recognition

Friedman was named a Fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

in 1986.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Friedman, Joyce 1928 births 2018 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians American computer scientists American women computer scientists Computational linguistics researchers Operations researchers Wellesley College alumni Radcliffe College alumni Harvard University alumni Stanford University faculty University of Michigan faculty Boston University faculty Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 20th-century American women 21st-century American women