Stanley Gill (26 March 1926 – 5 April 1975) was a British computer scientist. He is credited, along with Maurice Wilkes and David Wheeler, with inventing the first computer subroutine.
Early life, education and career
Stanley Gill was born on March 26, 1926, in Worthing, West Sussex, England. He attended Worthing High School for Boys and was part of an amateur dramatic society during his school years.
In 1943, he received a State Scholarship and enrolled at St John's College, Cambridge, where he studied Mathematics and Natural Sciences. He graduated with a BA in 1947 and an MA in 1950. From 1947 to 1950, Gill worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he met his wife, Audrey Lee. They married in 1949. From 1952 to 1955, he was a Research Fellow at St John's College, working in a team led by Maurice Wilkes. His research involved important work with the EDSAC computer in the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1952, he created an early computer game. The game featured a small dot (called a sheep) moving toward a line with two gates. Players could open the upper gate by interrupting the light beam from the EDSAC's paper tape reader, such as by placing their hand in the beam. If the beam remained unbroken, the lower gate would open.
Gill earned a PhD in 1953. After spending a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, he joined the Computer Department at Ferranti Ltd. in the UK. In 1963, he became Professor of Automatic Data Processing at UMIST, Manchester. Later, he was appointed to the newly created Chair of Computing Science and Computing Unit at Imperial College, University of London. This position was later combined into the Imperial College Centre for Computing and Automation, which Gill directed while working as a consultant for the Ministry of Technology. He was a founding member of the Real Time Club in 1967 and its chairman from 1970 to 1975. In 1970, he became Chairman of Software Sciences Holdings Ltd. and served as a director for several companies in the Miles Roman Group. From 1972 until his death in 1975, he was a Senior Consultant for PA International Management Consultants Ltd.
Gill traveled to many countries and helped establish computing departments at universities worldwide. He also served as President of the British Computer Society from 1967 to 1968.
Publications
- The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer by Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stanley Gill; (original 1951); reprinted with a new introduction by Martin Campbell-Kelly; 198 pages; ISBN 0-262-23118-2. Available through the Charles Babbage Institute's Archive.org Full Text.
- Papers of Professor Stanley Gill 1964–1971, Imperial College Archives and Corporate Records Unit, Room 455, Sherfield Building, Imperial College, London, UK.
- Gill, Stanley. Second Progress Report on the Automatic Computing Engine, National Physical Laboratory, Mathematics Division. (1949)
- Gill, Stanley. A process for the step-by-step integration of differential equations in an automatic digital computing machine. Published in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Volume 47, page 96 (1951). [The Runge-Kutta-Gill method.] https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305004100026414
- Gill, Stanley. The diagnosis of mistakes in programmes on the EDSAC. Published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Volume 206, page 538 (1951). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.1951.0087
- Gill, Stanley. "The application of an electronic digital computer to problems in mathematics and physics." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, November 1952.
- Gill, Stanley and Bernhart, Frank R. "An extension of Winn's result on reducible minor neighborhoods." (1973).