August 30
On August 30, 1906, Mina Spiegel Rees was born in Cleveland, Ohio, into a family that would move to New York City, where she grew up and attended Hunter College — then a women's institution and one of the best public colleges in the country. She graduated in 1923, completed a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1931, and returned to Hunter to teach.
In 1943, she was hired as a technical aide in the Applied Mathematics Panel of the National Defense Research Committee, the body coordinating American mathematics for wartime use. The title was deliberately understated. In practice, Rees managed the contract structure through which the Panel mobilized academic mathematicians for military problems: ballistics calculations, fire control tables, bomb trajectory analysis, submarine detection algorithms, cryptographic techniques.
When the war ended, she was appointed head of the mathematics branch of the newly formed Office of Naval Research — the first woman to head a branch of that office. The position she held from 1946 to 1953 made her one of the most consequential figures in early American computer science, because the ONR was the primary funder of academic computing research in that period.
She helped decide which projects received funding. The ONR's postwar grants supported the computer projects at Princeton (von Neumann's IAS machine), the University of Pennsylvania (ENIAC's successors), MIT (the Whirlwind), and a dozen other institutions. The architecture of early American computer science — which institutions built machines, which approaches received resources, which research programs survived — was partly shaped by Rees's funding decisions.
In 1952 she received the Navy's Distinguished Public Service Award, the first woman so honored. She was elected the first female president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1971. She died in 1997.
The histories of computing that trace the lineage of early machines through the men who built them rarely trace the funding decisions that made the building possible.
Rees held real power over early American computing research — not symbolic recognition, but decision-making authority over which projects received resources during the critical formative period. The standard computing histories are organized around machines and their builders. They are not organized around the funding structures that determined which machines got built. Rees sat at the center of that funding structure.
A new forgotten woman, every day. Direct to you.