Kateryna Yushchenko
Creator of the Address programming language; first Soviet woman with a doctorate in programming
Timeline - Yushchenko in the record
10 referenced events from the Ternary Dreams archive.
Millions die in the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine. Kateryna Yushchenko, who grew up in Chyhyryn in central Ukraine, is thirteen.
The purges reach their peak. Repression strikes the future computing elite directly: Yushchenko's parents are arrested in 1937, Bashir Rameev's father in 1938: 'children of enemies of the people' will later build the Soviet Union's first computers.
Kateryna Yushchenko's father is arrested as a 'Ukrainian nationalist' and sentenced to ten years; her mother is imprisoned as well after trying to prove his innocence. Expelled from Kiev University as a 'daughter of enemies of the people', Yushchenko can only study at the Central Asian University in Tashkent.
She meets her future husband, mathematics graduate Oleksiy Yushchenko, seconded to her laboratory to write programs for the MESM. Together they work on ballistic and rocket calculations under academicians Keldysh and Lyapunov.
Kateryna Yushchenko creates the Address programming language with indirect addressing (pointers), before Fortran, COBOL and ALGOL. It is used on most Soviet computers.
Yushchenko becomes the first person in the USSR to earn the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in programming: the daughter of 'enemies of the people' who was once expelled from her first year of university.
During Apollo-Soyuz a BESM-6 complex processes the Soviet telemetry.
Kateryna Yushchenko dies in Kiev in her 82nd year and is buried there.
Ukrposhta is reported to have issued a stamp block featuring Yushchenko in a series on women in science. She is now compared to Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace in Ukrainian memory culture.
Kremenchuk and Lviv are reported to have renamed streets in her honor.
The research file for this dossier holds 6 verified source entries, 6 of them distinct works. The sources page lists every one of them with what it covers, how it was reached, and the sharpest point at which this page and its sources come apart.