Professor Stanley J. Gill (26 March 1926 – 1975) was a British

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 ...

credited, along with

Maurice Wilkes Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes (26 June 1913 – 29 November 2010) was a British computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored program computers, and who inv ...

and David Wheeler, with the invention of the first computer

subroutine In computer programming, a function or subroutine is a sequence of program instructions that performs a specific task, packaged as a unit. This unit can then be used in programs wherever that particular task should be performed. Functions may ...

Early life, education and career

Stanley Gill was born 26 March 1926 in

Worthing Worthing () is a seaside town in West Sussex, England, at the foot of the South Downs, west of Brighton, and east of Chichester. With a population of 111,400 and an area of , the borough is the second largest component of the Brighton and Hov ...

, West Sussex, England. He was educated at Worthing High School for Boys and was, during his schooldays, a member of an amateur dramatic society. In 1943, he was awarded a State Scholarship and went to

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch Lady Margaret Beaufort. In constitutional terms, the college is a charitable corpo ...

, where he read Mathematics/Natural Sciences. He graduated BA in 1947 and MA in 1950. Gill worked at the National Physical Laboratory from 1947 to 1950, where he met his wife, Audrey Lee, whom he married in 1949. From 1952 to 1955 he was a Research Fellow at St John's working in a team led by Maurice Wilkes; the research involved pioneering work with the

EDSAC The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal ''First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'', the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the Universi ...

computer in the

Cavendish Laboratory The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the School of Physical Sciences. The laboratory was opened in 1874 on the New Museums Site as a laboratory for experimental physics and is named ...

. In 1952, he developed a very early computer game. It involved a dot (termed a sheep) approaching a line in which one of two gates could be opened. The game was controlled via the lightbeam of the EDSAC's paper tape reader. Interrupting it (such as by the player placing their hand in it) would open the upper gate. Leaving the beam unbroken would result in the lower gate opening. He gained a PhD in 1953 and, following a year as Visiting Assistant Professor at the

University of Illinois, Urbana The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign, Illinois, Champai ...

, joined the Computer Department at Ferranti Ltd. In the UK in 1963 he was appointed Professor of Automatic Data Processing, UMIST, Manchester and, following various consultancies including International Computers Ltd he was appointed in 1964 to the newly created Chair of Computing Science and Computing Unit at

Imperial College Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

. This was later merged into the Imperial College Centre for Computing and Automation, which Gill became director of, whilst he worked as a consultant to the Ministry of Technology. Gill was a founding member of the

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in 1967 and its chairman from 1970 to 1975. In 1970 he became Chairman of Software Sciences Holdings Ltd and was Director of various companies in the Miles Roman Group. From 1972 until his death in 1975 he was Senior Consultant to PA International Management Consultants Ltd. Gill travelled widely and advised on the establishment of departments of computing in several universities around the world. He was also President of the

British Computer Society Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

from 1967 to 1968.

Publications

* ''

The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer ''The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer'' (sometimes called ''WWG'', after its authors' initials) was the first book on computer programming. Published in 1951, it was written by Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stanle ...

'' by

, David Wheeler, and Stanley Gill; (original 1951); reprinted with new introduction by Martin Campbell-Kelly; 198 pp.; . Available through

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

Archive.org Full Text
* Papers of Professor Stanley Gill 1964-1971, Imperial College Archives and Corporate Records Unit, Room 455, Sherfield Building, Imperial College, London, UK. * Gill, Stanley. Second Progress Report on the Automatic Computing Engine, National Physical Laboratory, Mathematics Division. (1949) * Gill, Stanley. A process for the step-by-step integration of differential equations in an automatic digital computing machine. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc, v. 47, p. 96 (1951). he Runge-Kutta-Gill method.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305004100026414 * Gill, Stanley. The diagnosis of mistakes in programmes on the EDSAC. Proc. Roy. Soc. A., v. 206, p. 538 (1951). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.1951.0087 * Gill, Stanley. "The application of an electronic digital computer to problems in mathematics and physics." PhD diss., University of Cambridge, November 1952. * Gill, Stanley and Bernhart, Frank R.. "An extension of Winn's result on reducible minor neighborhoods." (1973).

References

External links

Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine webpage on Stanley Gill
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gill, Stanley 1926 births 1975 deaths Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge British computer scientists History of computing in the United Kingdom People educated at Worthing High School

Early life, education and career

Publications

References

Further reading

External links