chomicki@brillig.umd.edu (Jan Chomicki) (10/18/88)
Rita G. Minker
April 28, 1927 - October 11, 1988
Rita G. Minker, early worker in the field of computer
programming, died on October 11, 1988 of cancer at the age
of 61. Mrs. Minker received a B.S. degree with High Honors
in Mathematics from Douglass College in 1948 and a M.A.
degree in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in
1950.
In the summer of 1950 Mrs. Minker started to work at
the prestigious Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill,
New Jersey. She programmed network problems for one of the
early digital computers, the Bell Relay Machine. She was
among the first computer programmers in the United States.
On June 24, 1951 she married Jack Minker, who she had met at
the University of Wisconsin. The couple moved to Buffalo,
New York, where Mrs. Minker was employed as a mathematician
at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories. She worked on
electronic analog computers on which she simulated the per-
formance of missile systems. In 1952 she was hired by RCA
in Camden, New Jersey and became the second computer pro-
grammer, and the first woman programmer to work at that com-
pany. She programmed the Bizmac, RCA's first computer.
In 1953 Mrs. Minker took time off from the computing
profession to raise a family. In April 1964, when her two
children were enrolled in school, Mrs. Minker returned to
work as a mathematician and computer programmer in the newly
formed Division of Computer Research and Technology (DCRT)
at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)in Bethesda, Mary-
land. She was one of the charter members of this division,
formed to service the computer needs of medical researchers
at the NIH. Although the computing profession had made sig-
nificant progress during the time she was raising her fam-
ily, Mrs. Minker was able to rapidly learn the new technol-
ogy and recapture her skills as a programmer and mathemati-
cian. She served as Head, Training Unit in DCRT from 1968 -
1975, and instituted training courses to permit medical
researchers to learn how to program and work with computers
and become familiar with statistical methods. In 1975,
after having built-up the Training Division, she joined the
Statistical Software Section, Laboratory of Statistical and
Mathematical Methodology of the DCRT. She was able to par-
ticipate and assist medical researchers with their program-
ming and statistics problems. She was also in charge of
consulting on and maintaining SPSS, a major statistical
package.
Mrs. Minker was co-author of a number of medical jour-
nal articles on the schistosomyacin disease and was ack-
nowledged for her assistance in numerous medical journal
articles. Together with her husband, she published an arti-
cle in the Annals of the History of Computing, which traced
the historical developments in the optimization of boolean
expressions and related problems.
Mrs. Minker had a long bout with cancer. She first
contracted breast cancer in 1975. The disease reoccurred in
1985. Because of her illness she was forced to retire from
the government in April 1988, exactly 24 years after she was
hired at the NIH. Mrs. Minker is survived by her son,
Michael Saul Minker who resides with his wife Katharine in
Chevy Chase, Maryland; by her daughter, Sally Anne Minker,
who lives in Bethesda, Maryland; by her husband, Jack
Minker, of Bethesda, Maryland; her father, Louis H. Goldberg
and step-mother, Anna Goldberg of North Miami Beach,
Florida; and brother, Sanford H. Goldberg of West Orange,
New Jersey.
Funeral services will be held at:
10:00AM Thursday, October 13, 1988
Congregation Beth El
8215 Old Georgetown Road
Bethesda, Maryland
Contributions may be made to the American Cancer Society in
her memory.
The family will receive condolence calls during the
period October 13, 1988 through the evening of October 18,
1988 at the home of:
Jack Minker
6913 Millwood Road
Bethesda, Maryland 20817
If you wish to offer condolences by e-mail, Professor Minker
can be reached at <minker@mimsy.umd.edu>.