Biography of Donald Davies
Donald Watts Davies (Photo courtesy of NPL)
Donald Watt Davies was born in Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley. His father, a clerk at a coalmine, died a few months later, and his mother took Donald and his twin sister back to her home town of Portsmouth, where he went to school.
He gained BSc degrees in physics in 1943 and mathematics in 1947 at Imperial College, London, both with first class honours. He was awarded the Lubbock Memorial Prize as the leading mathematician of his year at London University in 1947. He also worked at Birmingham University on atomic research as an assistant to Klaus Fuchs, and at ICI Billingham.
In September 1947, he joined NPL and played a major part in the development of the Pilot ACE computer (based on Alan Turing's design) and indeed spotted mistakes in Turing's seminal 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, much to Turing's annoyance. These were perhaps some of the first "programming" errors in existence, even if they were for a theoretical computer, the universal Turing machine. He further contributed in the development of full scale ACE as well.
Not only this but as his interests widened, he developed a road traffic simulator, and in 1958 he initiated a project to use a computer to translate technical Russian into English.
