Kateryna Yushchenko

Kateryna Lohvynivna Yushchenko (, , 8 December 1919, Chyhyryn; died 15 August 2001) was a Soviet Ukrainian computer and information research scientist, corresponding member of USSR Academy of Sciences (1976), and member of The International Academy of Computer Science. She developed one of the world's first high-level languages with indirect address in programming (Pointers are analogous to this addressing), called the Address programming language. Over the period of her academic career, Yushchenko supervised 45 Ph.D. students. Further professional achievements include Yushchenko being awarded two USSR State Prizes, The USSR Council of Ministers Prize, The Academician Glushkov Prize, and The Order of Princess Olga. Yushchenko was the first woman in the USSR to become a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in programming. Biography Kateryna Lohvynivna Yushchenko (née Rvacheva) was born in 1919 in Chyhyryn, central Ukraine. She started her undergraduate studies in Kyiv University in 1937, and during the Second World War she attended the Central Asian State University in Tashkent, graduating in 1942. After the war she returned to Ukraine and in 1950, under the direction of Boris Gnedenko, she obtained a Ph.D. from the Institute of Mathematics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. For a period of seven years, Yushchenko held the position of Senior Researcher of the Kiev Institute of Mathematics of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences (1950–57). In 1954, the Levedev Laboratory (where the first computer in continental Europe MESM was created) was transferred to the Institute of Mathematics. Yushchenko was a member of the joint group of scholars operating the MESM. In 1957 she became Director of the Institute of Computer Science of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences. During her forty years service to the institute, Yushchenko created an internationally notable scientific school of theoretical programming. Scientific contributions Yushchenko is best known for her creation of Address programming language, the first fundamental advancement in the scientific school of theoretical programming. This language provided the free location of a program in computer memory. In the process of working with MESM, it became clear that the more complex tasks were difficult to solve by writing simple machine programs.