Phyllis Fox
Phyllis Fox was a mathematician and computer scientist whose work on LISP connected her career to early AI. She attended Wellesley in the 1940s, worked on a differential analyzer at General Electric, and earned electrical-engineering degrees at the University of Colorado and MIT plus a mathematics doctorate at MIT. She assisted on MIT's Whirlwind project, studied numerical solutions at NYU's Courant Institute from 1954 to 1958, helped develop DYNAMO, wrote the first LISP manual, taught at Newark, and worked on Bell Labs' PORT library. The AAAS elected her a Fellow in 1986, and she died in 2017.
- Works
- 7
- Citations
- 205
- h-index
- 6
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 15 October 2026.
Timeline
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1944–1954
From Wellesley to Whirlwind
She attends Wellesley in the 1940s and operates a differential analyzer for General Electric from 1944 to 1946. She earns an electrical-engineering B.S. at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1948, an M.S. in electrical engineering at MIT in 1949, and a mathematics Sc.D. at MIT in 1954 for research on coordinate perturbations. At MIT, she assists on Jay Forrester's Whirlwind project.
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1954–1958
Numerical analysis at Courant
From 1954 to 1958, she works on numerical solutions of partial differential equations on a UNIVAC for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission computing center at NYU's Courant Institute.
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1959
The first DYNAMO version
In 1959, she and Alexander Pugh write the first version of DYNAMO, an improved version of SIMPLE. The system-dynamics language serves industrial dynamics and extends to population and resource studies.
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March 1960
The first LISP manual
She collaborates on the first LISP interpreter and writes the first LISP manual, published in March 1960. LISP's list-processing approach is used in AI work.
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1963–1972
A Newark professorship
In 1963, she moves from MIT to Newark College of Engineering and becomes a full professor in 1972.
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1973–1984
Bell Labs and PORT
In 1973, she moves to Bell Labs to work on the highly portable numerics library PORT. She retires from Bell Labs in 1984.
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1986
An AAAS fellowship
The AAAS elects her a Fellow in 1986.
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May 2017
Death at age 94
She dies on May 23, 2017, at age 94.
Sources and credits
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