Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine April 2018 - 55

DOI. No. 10.1109/MAES.2018.180038

Obituary

Dr. Philip Mayne Woodward, DSc, Applied Mathematician Who Coined the Term 'Artificial
Intelligence'
Susan Bond, Suzette Woodward

hilip Mayne Woodward, who has died aged 98, was a British mathematician, pioneering radar engineer, and world
renowned horologist. Woodward was born on 6 September
1919 and was educated at Blundell's School. He won a scholarship
to study mathematics at Wadham College Oxford in 1938. While
there, he was appointed the college organist. His undergraduate
course was interrupted when he was drafted in 1941 to the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), the original home
of radar research for the RAF. This was the entry into the world of
science for which he craved and led to a career in the Scientific
Civil Service that spanned four decades.
It was then that he met Alice Robertson, newly graduated from
the University of St Andrews, and they married in 1942. Just after
the war they travelled to Europe in Woodward's MG and must have
been the focus of great interest in the tiny Swiss hamlet of Fionnay
after which their house was named.

WOODWARD'S AMBIGUITY FUNCTION

HIGH LEVEL SOFTWARE TECHNIQUES

Woodward describes this time as 'real research with a real purpose'. Animated by Claude Shannon's theory of communication,
Woodward pioneered in 1950 a new approach to the problem of
radar signal detection in the presence of random noise to eliminate all but the wanted information the echoes might contain. His
analysis, based on Bayesian probability theory, is now seen as being many years ahead of its time. All of Woodward's research had
strictly practical aims, whether in numerical methods, diffraction
theory, wave propagation, antenna design, computer programming,
or documentation. In 1953, he wrote Probability and Information
Theory, with Applications to Radar. This work introduced a mathematical technique for the design of coherent radar systems based
on Woodward's Ambiguity Function, which over six decades later
continues to be used by radar engineers all over the world.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
His publications in the field of random processes led to being invited in 1956 by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist John H Van
Vleck to take up a visiting lectureship at Harvard University. One
day in that year, Oliver Selfridge and Marvin Minsky called at
the Cruft laboratory to discuss the programming of computers to
exhibit quasi-intelligent behaviour, an emerging field at the time.
APRIL 2018

Woodward recalled a snappy title was needed, if only to oust the
anthropomorphic phrase 'electronic brain'. The word 'intelligence'
had already been agreed upon when Woodward suggested prefacing it with 'artificial' to suggest the mimicking of mental processes. In five minutes, the now familiar term 'artificial intelligence'
had been coined.
Whilst in the US, Woodward played the recorder in a weekly
consort meeting at the home of Oliver Straus, on Beacon Hill,
Boston. Straus was the grandson of Isadore Straus of Macy's store
in New York and his wife Ida, the courageous couple who chose
to go down in the Titanic. One Sunday morning, Woodward was
puzzled to be asked to go over the bravura harpsichord part of
Bach's fifth Brandenburg Concerto. As a farewell gift, and to baptise his new harpsichord, Straus had secretly hired a section of the
Boston Symphony Orchestra to come that afternoon to play the
ripieno with him.

Returning to his research base in Malvern, at the Royal Signals
and Radar Establishment (RSRE) of the British Ministry of Defence (MoD), and now part of the QinetiQ Company, Woodward
gathered a mathematical team of exceptional talent to develop
techniques for efficient computer usage in scientific work. In the
1960s, this hinged largely on the availability of high-level programming languages. The implementation of any new language
calls for software of the highest calibre for which purpose a member of the team devised a syntactic technique that proved uniquely
labour saving. Higher authority at the MoD headquarters found it
difficult to monitor work of this nature and felt obliged to call in a
leading American software house for independent assessment. The
emissary, remembered by the examinees for his theatrical arrival
in a white Porsche, reported that in Malvern the MoD had a 'crack
team using software techniques in advance of any to be found in
private industry in the US'.
Nobel Prize-winner Denis Gabor at Imperial College was
supportive of Woodward's work and was influential in sponsoring him for an individual merit post as Deputy Chief Scientific
Officer. With this added authority, Woodward was able to steer
the MoD to accept a programming language designed by his own
team as an inter-service standard for small military computers
of the 1960s.

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