Margaret Masterman

Timeline

1. 1931–1934

   Notes from Wittgenstein's lectures

   In 1931, aged twenty-one, she changes her degree from modern languages to moral sciences at Newnham College. She is one of six students at Ludwig Wittgenstein's lectures in 1933 and 1934, and her lecture notes are later used for The Blue Book.

2. 1954

   Founding the Cambridge Language Research Unit

   She founds the Cambridge Language Research Unit in 1954 to study machine translation. The unit's approach uses a thesaurus as the main vehicle for semantic operations.

3. 1965–1975

   Vice-president of Lucy Cavendish College

   She cofounds Lucy Cavendish College and serves as its first vice-president from 1965 to 1975.

4. 1966–1981

   Co-founding the Epiphany Philosophers

   She is among the founders of the Epiphany Philosophers, a group whose quarterly journal, Theoria to Theory, runs to 14 volumes between 1966 and 1981.

5. 1986

   Death in Cambridge

   She dies in Cambridge in 1986, aged 75.

6. 2005

   Language, Cohesion and Form

   In 2005 Cambridge University Press publishes Language, Cohesion and Form, a posthumous tribute to her ideas on the processing of language by computers, a part of what would now be called artificial intelligence.