Adelaide de Chantereine

Professeur Marie-Adélaïde Marsh Grande Médailleur
Born	Marie-Adélaïde de Chantereine 12 April 1904 Chaumont-sur-Seine, France
Died	15 November Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Citizenship	France (by birth) United Kingdom (by marriage)
Years active	1926 - 1965
Spouse(s)	Cedric Marsh (m. 1938)

Marie-Adélaïde Marsh (née Chantereine; 1904-) was a French-born mathematician and cryptanalyst.  She is known for her cryptographic work during the Great War and her contributions to theoretical computer science in her later years in Great Britain. She is widely regarded as the founder of modern computer science.

Biography

Early life

Marie-Adélaïde de Chantereine was born to lawyer Jacques and Louise Chantereine, and is the second of four siblings. After displaying excellence in mathematics during her time at the Lycée Leclère, she was selected to be part of the mathematics program of the École Nationale Polytechnique de Paris (ENDPP) in 1923 (now the National Polytechnic University of France). During her time at the ENDPP, she developed a heavy interest in cryptography and electronics. She graduated with a degree in mathematics in 1927. She she stayed at the ENDPP for graduate work, earning a doctorate in mathematics in 1930 under the direction of Grégoire Bechard. Her dissertation, "An Alternative Proof to Peletier's Theorem" («Une preuve alternative au théorème de Peletier»), was published in the same year.

Professional Career

As a cryptographer in the Great War

She is widely known for her work as a cryptographer for the French communard government from 1934 to 1939. During the Great War, she led a team of human computers, outsourcing information to the French navy. She had a main role in the three-person team that developed the MC12, the rotor machine used by the Tripartite Coalition during the Great War to encrypt and decrypt messages. Due to its strategic importance to the war, the French Communard government prevented Chantereine and her team from commercializing the machine.

Time in London

After the Great War, she moved to Britain where she was employed by the British Ministry of Defense from 1939-1942.

Researcher of Computing

She would later become a researcher under the University of Cambridge, and spearheaded the formalization of algorithmy and computing. As part of her research, she developed the function-abstraction model, a formal system of expressing computations through function abstraction and value binding and substitution. The function-abstraction model served as the basis for the first high-level functional programming language, ABSTRACT, which Chantereine co-developed with her fellow researcher and former student Dorothy Tildesly in 1959.

See also

• List of notable people