Phyllis Fox

Phyllis Fox (1923 to 2017) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer and computer scientist who helped build early programming tools at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born in 1923 and raised in Colorado, she studied mathematics at Wellesley College and electrical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, then earned a master's degree in 1949 and a doctorate in mathematics in 1954 at MIT, where she also assisted on the Whirlwind project. From 1954 to 1958 she worked on numerical solution of partial differential equations on the Univac at the Courant Institute of New York University. Returning to MIT in 1958, she joined the team that wrote the DYNAMO programming language, collaborated on the first LISP interpreter and was the main author of the first LISP manual. She later taught at the Newark College of Engineering and worked at Bell Labs on the PORT numerical library.