Kathleen Booth co-founded Birkbeck's Department of Numerical Automation, regarded as the world's first university computer science department.
In 1957, Kathleen Booth, together with Andrew Booth, co-founded the Department of Numerical Automation at Birkbeck College, University of London. This department is widely regarded by computing historians as the first dedicated university computer science department in the world, predating similar departments established at other universities by several years.
The department grew out of the Booths' earlier work building and programming a succession of early computers—the ARC, SEC, and APE(X)C—at Birkbeck during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Recognizing the need for formal academic study and teaching of computing as a discipline in its own right, rather than merely a tool within mathematics or engineering, Kathleen and Andrew Booth established a dedicated academic home for the emerging field.
Kathleen Booth taught some of the earliest university-level courses in computer science within this department, helping to train a new generation of programmers and computer scientists at a time when almost no formal curriculum for the subject existed anywhere in the world.
The department later evolved into Birkbeck's School of Computer Science and Information Systems, which continues to operate today. Its founding stands as one of Kathleen Booth's most consequential institutional legacies, cementing computer science's place as an independent academic discipline and providing a model that would be emulated internationally in the following decades.