Here’s the abstract of my recent article about John Womersley’s early career:
John Womersley (1907–1958) is best known for appointing Alan Turing to the postwar project to design and build an electronic computer at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL). Using unexplored archival material, this article focuses on Womersley’s early career and describes how, from relatively humble origins, he established a significant reputation within the UK’s scientific state leading to his appointment in 1944 as the first Superintendent of the NPL’s new Mathematics Division. The principal conclusion is that Womersley is best understood not as a scientist or engineer in the traditional mould but rather as a “scientific worker” who used his talents to build a career in a variety of state-sponsored institutions in the 1930s and 1940s. The article also highlights the important role of statistics in Womersley’s career and the establishment of the Mathematics Division.
A longer preprint version of the article can be found here.