Jessie MacWilliams

Florence Jessie MacWilliams (1917 to 1990) was an English mathematician who worked in coding theory and was among the first women to publish in the field. Born in Stoke-on-Trent, she studied at Cambridge, moved to the United States in 1939 and studied at Johns Hopkins and then Harvard. She joined Bell Labs as a programmer in 1955 and learned coding theory there, but was denied a research post until she held a doctorate, so she returned to Harvard in 1961 and completed a PhD in 1962 under Andrew Gleason. Her thesis on combinatorial problems of elementary group theory contains the result now called the MacWilliams identity, which later proved critical in establishing the linear programming bound on code rate. Between 1962 and 1976 she produced results on the algebraic and combinatorial properties of codes, including cyclic codes and Abelian group codes. With Neil Sloane she wrote The Theory of Error-Correcting Codes, published in 1977, and in 1980 she became the first Noether Lecturer.