The early days of computer science had many pioneers, including one few people might expect: a Catholic nun named Sister Mary Kenneth Keller.
She was born Evelyn Marie Keller on Dec. 17, 1913, in Cleveland, OH, but grew up mostly in Chicago, IL.
In 1932, at 18, she joined the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dubuque, IA, where she took the name Sister Mary Kenneth the following year.
Keller earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematical sciences from DePaul University in Chicago in 1943, then completed a master’s degree there in 1952.
In 1961, she attended her first computer education workshop at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.
Dartmouth had no female undergraduates at the time, and it made an exception to its no-women rule so Keller could work in its computer lab during a summer program for high school teachers.
There, she learned to use a computer and write simple programs on the college’s LGP-30 computer.
Introduced in 1956 by Librascope, the desk-sized LGP-30 digital computer cost $50,000, which is roughly $621,000 in 2026 dollars.
The LGP-30 was used for engineering, education, scientific, and mathematical calculations, including research, design analysis, statistical work, and applied engineering problems.
The 800-pound computer system ran on standard 115-volt alternating current (AC) power, drew 1,500 watts, and required no special air conditioning.
Inside, it featured 113 vacuum tubes, 1,450 diodes, and a 4,096-word magnetic drum memory.
Each 32-bit word allocated 30 bits for data, one sign bit, and one spacer bit, yielding roughly 15 kilobytes (KB) of usable storage (out of 16 KB total).
Users interacted with the LGP-30 through a Friden Flexowriter, an electric typewriter with a keyboard, paper-tape punch, and paper-tape reader.
A built-in oscilloscope monitored the control counter register, instruction register, and accumulator register, providing a real-time view of the computer’s internal operation.
Looking back on her experience, Keller said, “I just went out to look at a computer one day, and I never came back . . . It looked to me as if the computer would be the most revolutionary tool for doing math that I could get.”
In May 1964, Dartmouth College made history when BASIC, the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, ran its first program on a General Electric GE-225 mainframe computer.
BASIC is a high-level programming language that uses simple, English-like commands to help students and non-specialists learn programming concepts.
In 1964, Sister Keller revealed her vision for the future of academia when she predicted, “Its function in information retrieval will make it the hub of tomorrow’s libraries.”
In June 1964, Minneapolis-based Control Data Corp. published its FORTRAN-63 reference manual for the CDC 1604 and 1604-A computers.
FORTRAN, short for Formula Translation, was one of the first high-level programming languages.
Its compiler, the software that translated FORTRAN programs into machine instructions, was adapted for the CDC 1604 and CDC 3600 systems.
On May 14, 1965, Control Data Corp. reached an agreement to acquire the commercial computer business of General Precision Equipment Corp., including its Librascope division and support for existing LGP-30 installations.
Her dissertation advisors officially signed off on Keller’s doctoral research on May 21, 1965.
Her dissertation was titled “Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns.”
Keller wrote custom algorithms using Control Data Corp.’s FORTRAN-63 compiler on the university’s large mainframe computers to complete this pioneering work.
At a time when most people were unfamiliar with these computing concepts, she studied how mainframe computers could recognize patterns, test logic, manipulate symbols, and infer rules from examples.
Inside the computer, those examples were processed as binary data, the ones and zeros digital computers use to represent information.
This early work in pattern recognition, rule formation, and learning from examples later became important foundations in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Sister Mary Kenneth Keller made national history on June 7, 1965, at 51, by becoming the first woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
After earning her Ph.D., Keller joined Clarke College in Dubuque, a women’s college founded by her own religious order, and established its brand-new computer science department.
In 1965, the National Science Foundation awarded her a grant for instructional equipment for undergraduate education.
Keller led Clarke’s computer science program for 20 years, dedicating her career to making computing accessible to all.
She promoted computer literacy, taught programming to people without technical backgrounds, co-authored educational materials, and continued researching computer-generated patterns.
By 1975, Keller was calling the computer "the greatest interdisciplinary tool” invented so far.
She also observed, “We’re having an information explosion, among others, and it’s certainly obvious that information is of no use unless it’s available.”
Her pioneering journey in computing is remembered today.
Sister Mary Kenneth Keller died Jan. 10, 1985, at 71 in Dubuque.
