The British Library’s Sound and vision blog has a nice piece on Mary Lee Berners-Lee, mother of Tim, who as everybody knows wrote the first spec for what became the World Wide Web, while working at CERN in the late 1980s.
” After studying mathematics at the University of Birmingham, she [MLBL] spent the latter part of the Second World War working at the Telecommunications Research Establish (TRE), the secret centre of Britain’s radar development effort. With the war over she returned to her studies, before leaving Britain for the Mount Stromlo observatory in Australia in 1947, where she worked classifying the spectra of stars. In 1951 she returned to Britain and chanced across an advert for a job at Ferranti in Manchester that would change her life: “I was reading Nature and saw an advertisement one day for – saying, ‘Mathematicians wanted to work on a digital computer.’”
One of many “voices of science” in the Library holdings.
A Few Reasonable Words 