Margaret Masterman

Margaret Masterman
Margaret Masterman (Braithwaite)
Born 4 May 1910(1910-05-04)
London
Died 1 April 1986(1986-04-01) (aged 75)
Cambridge
Residence United Kingdom
Nationality British
Fields Computational linguistics
Known for Cambridge Language Research Unit
Notes
Husband: Richard Bevan Braithwaite

Margaret Masterman (1910–1986) was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation.

Biography

Margaret Masterman was born in London on 4 May 1910 to Charles F. G. Masterman, a politician, and Lucy Blanche Lyttelton, a poet and a writer. In 1932 she married Richard Bevan Braithwaite, a philosopher. They had a son and a daughter.

Work

Margaret Masterman was one of six students in Wittgenstein's course of 1933-34 whose notes were compiled as The Blue Book. In 1955 she founded and directed the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU), which grew from an informal discussion group to a major research center in computational linguistics in its time.

She was one of cofounders of Lucy Cavendish College and its first Vice-President (1965–1975). She was a great-niece of Lucy Cavendish after whom the college is named.

References

  • Masterman, Margaret (2005). "Margaret Masterman". In Wilks, Yorick. Language, Cohesion and Form. Studies in Natural language Processing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-45489-6. 
  • Wilks, Yorick (2000). "Margaret Masterman". In Hutchins, William John. Early years in machine translation: memoirs and biographies of pioneers. ISBN 90-272-4586X. 
  • http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F1932%2FLCCA%2FLP1