Beryl May Dent


Beryl May Dent, was a British mathematical physicist, technical librarian, and a programmer of early analog and digital computers to solve electrical engineering problems. A graduate of the University of Bristol, Dent wrote her master's thesis on the forces between atoms and ions, with the objective of calculating theoretically the properties of carbonate and nitrate crystals. Later work has shown that the results she obtained had direct application to atomic force microscopy by predicting that non-contact imaging is possible only at small tip-sample separations.
In 1930, she joined Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company Ltd, Manchester, as a technical librarian for the scientific and technical staff of the research department. She contributed to papers on numerical methods for solving differential equations by the use of the differential analyser that was built for the University of Manchester and Douglas Hartree. She was the first to develop a detailed reduced major axis method for the best fit of a series of data points. Later in her career she became leader of the computation section at Metropolitan-Vickers, and then a supervisor in the research department for the section that was investigating semiconducting materials.

Early life

Beryl May Dent was born on, at Penley Villa, Park Lane, Chippenham, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of Eustace Edward Dent and his wife, Agnes, née Thornley. She was baptised at StPaul's, Chippenham, on 8 June 1900. Her mother, Agnes, was educated at the Harris Institute, Preston, Lancashire, passing examinations in science and art. She was a teacher at Attercliffe School, before moving to Goosnargh School, near her hometown of Preston, where her elder brother and sister, John William and Mary Ann Thornley, were the head teachers. In March 1894, she had applied for the headship at Fairfield School, Cockermouth, making the short list, but the board decided to appoint a local candidate. Agnes and Eustace married at St Mary's Church, Goosnargh, on 27 July 1898.
Her father, Eustace, had been educated at the Halifax Mechanics' Institute, obtaining a first class pass in mathematics. He then enrolled on a degree course at University College, Aberystwyth in the Education Day Training College. In January 1894, he was awarded a first by Aberystwyth, and a first in the external University of London examinations. At the time of Dent's birth, he was a senior assistant teacher at Chippenham County School. After five years at Chippenham, he left in October 1901 to become headteacher of the then recently established Warminster County School, located next to the Athenaeum Theatre. He was chair of the Warminster Urban District Council from 1920 to 1922, and remained as headteacher of the County School until his retirement in August 1929. Eustace was regular cast member of the Warminster Operatic Society; Beryl May Dent and her younger sister, Florence Mary, would often appear with him on stage in such operettas as Snow White and the seven dwarfs and the Princess Ju-Ju.

Education

Dent was educated at Warminster County School, where her father was head teacher. In August 1914, she passed the University of Oxford Junior Local Examination with first class honours. In the following year, she passed the senior examination with second class honours and a distinction in French. She then joined the sixth form and won the school prize for French in December 1916. In March 1918, Dent applied for a scholarship in mathematics from Somerville College, Oxford, one of the first two women's colleges in Oxford. She was highly commended but was not awarded a scholarship for that year, nor an exhibition.
She was accepted on to the general Bachelor of Arts degree course at the University of Bristol and passed her intermediate degree examinations in June 1920. For the following academic year, she took the honours course in mathematics at Bristol. After spending the summer of 1921 at her parent's home in Warminster, she returned for the start of the 1921/1922 academic year to find that Paul Dirac had joined the mathematics course. Dent and Dirac were taught applied mathematics by Henry Ronald Hassé, the then head of the Mathematics Department, and pure mathematics by Peter Fraser. Both of them had come from Cambridge. Fraser introduced them to mathematical rigour, projective geometry, and rigorous proofs in differential and integral calculus.
There was a choice of specialisation in the final year; applied or pure mathematics. As the only official, registered fee-paying student, Dent had the right to choose, and she settled on applied mathematics for the final year. The department could offer only one set of lectures so Dirac also had to follow the same course. In June 1923, she graduated with Dirac, gaining a Bachelor of Science degree in applied mathematics with First Class Honours. On 7 July 1923, she was awarded the Ashworth Hallett scholarship by the University of Bristol and was accepted as a research student at Newnham College, Cambridge.

Career

University of Bristol

In 1924, the University of Bristol Council set aside a portion of a bequest from Henry Herbert Wills for the Department of Physics where Professor Arthur Mannering Tyndall was building up a staff for teaching and research in the H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory, Royal Fort Gardens. In the same year, Dent returned to Bristol and was appointed a researcher in the Physics Department. From August 1925, John Lennard-Jones, from Trinity College, Cambridge, was elected Reader in Mathematical Physics. In March 1927, he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics, a Chair being created for him, with Dent becoming his research assistant in theoretical physics. He pioneered the theory of interatomic and intermolecular forces at Bristol and Dent became one of his first collaborators.
Lennard-Jones and Dent published six papers together between 1926 and 1928, dealing with the forces between atoms and ions, with the objective of calculating theoretically the properties of carbonate and nitrate crystals. Dent's thesis for her master's degree,, Some theoretical determinations of crystal structure, was the basis of the three papers that followed in 1927;, and with Sydney Chapman,. On 28 June 1927, Dent was awarded a Master of Science degree for her thesis and research work. In 1927, the physics laboratory at Bristol had a surplus of funds, and so it was decided that the funds would be used to provide more technical help. Consequently, Dent was asked to combine her research duties with the post of part-time departmental librarian.
, Dent's thesis advisor and co-author on a number of physics papers at the University of Bristol in the 1920s.
Dent was now living at Clifton Hill House, the university hall of residence for women in Clifton. She represented the University of Bristol Association of Alumni in 1927, and then later, the Manchester branch of the association. She had been appointed honorary secretary of the Bristol Cheeloo Association by March 1926. The association's aim was to raise sufficient funds to support a chair of chemistry at Cheeloo University. In an effort to publicise the cause and raise money, she presented to the local branch of the Women's International League in October 1928. In the same year, Lennard-Jones and Dent published two papers,, and with Sydney Chapman,, that studied the force fields on a thin crystal cleavage.
Around this time, quantum mechanics was developed to become the standard formulation for atomic physics. Lennard-Jones left Bristol in 1929 to study the subject for a year as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Göttingen. With her collaborator and advisor in Germany, Dent wrote one last paper before leaving the physics department at Bristol: examined the effect of the polarisation of surface ions in decreasing the surface energy of alkali halides. In December 1929, Dent resigned her position and it was accepted with regret by the Council of the University of Bristol. She left Bristol for Stretford, Manchester, to become the technical librarian for the scientific and technical staff in the research department at Metropolitan-Vickers. In 1930, Lennard-Jones returned to Bristol, as Dean of the Faculty of Science, and introduced the new quantum theories to the Bristol group.

Metropolitan-Vickers

Metropolitan-Vickers was a British heavy industrial firm, based at Trafford Park, Manchester. They were well known for industrial electrical equipment and generators, street lighting, electronics, steam turbines and diesel locomotives. They built the Metrovick 950, the first commercial transistorised computer. In 1917, a research department was established at the Trafford Park site, when the care of the library came within the remit of James George Pearce. He made the library the centre of a new technical intelligence section. In 1929, the technical intelligence section was substantially reorganised and expanded, and placed under the directorship of James Steele Park Paton. Dent joined the research department in January 1930 as one of only two women on the senior scientific and technical staff.
looking south west to the estate at Sompting where Dent lived in retirement.
By 1933, the Metropolitan-Vickers library had 3,000 engineering volumes and around the same number in pamphlets and patent specifications. Besides covering electrical subjects, the library covered accountancy, employment questions, and subjects of interest to the sales department. It also issued a weekly bulletin, scrutinised patents, handled patents taken out by research staff, and exchanged information with associated companies. From 1931 to 1936, Dent was honorary secretary to the founding committee for the northern branch of the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux. She was also a delegate at the fourteenth International Conference on Documentation and was invited to the Government's conference dinner on 22 September 1938 at the Great Dining Hall of Christ Church, Oxford. She served on various ASLIB committees and made conference presentations detailing the workings of different aspects of the company's library and information service.
Dent continued to publish papers in applied mathematics and contribute to papers on emerging computational technologies. In, she developed a detailed reduced major axis method for line fitting that built on the work of and. In she provided the key numerical integrations for differential equations to aid in the calculation of the space charge limitation of secondary current using a differential analyser. In 1946, she was promoted to section leader of the company's new computation section, and in the latter half of her career, became the section leader for the women in the research department that were working on semiconducting materials. She joined the Women's Engineering Society and published several papers on the application of digital computers to electrical design. She retired from Metropolitan-Vickers in 1960.

Death

Her father had died on at their shared home, 529 Kings Road, Stretford. Two years after her retirement, Dent and her elderly mother, Agnes, moved from to Stretford to 1 Cokeham Road, Sompting, West Sussex, a village in the coastal Adur District of West Sussex, between Lancing and Worthing. Agnes died on the and was cremated at the Downs Crematorium on 10 April 1967.
Beryl May Dent died at her home in Sompting on. She donated her body for medical examination, with the understanding that her remains would be returned later for a burial service at StMary's Church, Sompting, and afterwards, cremated at the Downs Crematorium. Dent never married, believing that getting married, and the subsequent pressures of family responsibilities, would be a "wastage" of a woman's training. However, she also believed that women leaving employment meant promotion opportunities for other women, and that married women could still return to work in mid-life.

Legacy

Professor Richard J. Smith has stated that Dent, in, was the first to develop a reduced major axis method for line fitting that built on the work of and. At the time of publication, Dent's referee, William Edwards Deming, was indifferent to Dent's paper. However, when Deming later developed his own line of best fit for a two-dimensional dataset, now known as Deming regression, this turned out to be a special case of the reduced major axis method developed by Dent. Deming's exposition of his method, in, does not cite Dent's work, but probably should have under the accepted norms of intellectual honesty.
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In 1928, Lennard-Jones and Dent published two papers, and, outlining the calculation of force fields on a thin crystal surface., suggests that the results obtained in, should be treated with caution. For example, the contraction a crystal plane would suffer under the conditions prescribed would not be the same as that of a similar plane with a solid mass of crystal behind it. Another difficulty arises because calculation of crystal surface field force fields are so great that simplifying assumptions have to be made to render them capable of any solution at all. However, later work by has shown that the Lennard-Jones and Dent paper has direct application to atomic force microscopy by predicting that non-contact imaging is possible only at small tip-sample separations.
Considerable research had been devoted to determining a transformer's internal transient voltage distribution. Early attempts were hampered by computational limitations encountered when solving large numbers of coupled differential equations with analog computers. It was not until recognised the limitations of the analog models and developed a digital computer model, and associated program, where any degree of non-uniformity in the transformer windings could be introduced and any form of input voltage applied.

Publications

Footnotes

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