Kathleen Antonelli

Kathleen "Kay" McNulty Mauchly Antonelli (12 February, 1921 – 20 April 2006) was an Irish–American computer programmer and one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.

She was born Kathleen Rita McNulty in Feymore, part of the small village of Creeslough in the Gaeltacht area (Irish-speaking region) of County Donegal, Ireland on February 12, 1921 during the Irish War of Independence. On the night of her birth, her father, James McNulty, who was an Irish Republican Army training officer, was arrested and imprisoned in Derry Gaol for two years. On his release, the family emigrated to the United States in October, 1924 and settled in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where James found work as a stonemason. At the time, Kathleen was unable to speak any English, only Irish; she would remember prayers in Irish for the rest of her life.

She attended parochial grade school in Chestnut Hill and Hallahan Catholic Girls High School in Philadelphia. In high school, she had taken a year of algebra, a year of plane geometry, a second year of algebra, and a year of trigonometry and solid geometry. After graduating high school, she enrolled in Chestnut Hill College for Women. During her studies, she took every mathematics course offered, including spherical trigonometry, differential calculus, projective geometry, partial differential equations, and statistics. She graduated with a degree in mathematics in June 1942, one of only a few mathematics majors out of a class of 92 women.

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