Six decades on, unsung pioneer Alison Harcourt honoured

Alison Harcourt will at last be recognised by the University of Melbourne for her breakthrough work in computer programming.

University of Melbourne maths professor Kate Smith-Miles, left, nominated linear programming pioneer Alison Harcourt for an honorary PhD. Picture: Aaron Francis

Almost six decades on, the University of Melbourne will recognise at last the unsung achievement of one of its pioneering female graduates.

It will award an honorary doctorate to mathematician Alison Harcourt, 88, whose work helped found a field of mathematics that launched a major productivity breakthrough of the computing revolution.

In 1960 Ms Harcourt published what Kate Smith-Miles, the university’s professor of applied mathematics, calls “one mighty paper” in the field of integer linear programming that became the basis for optimisation software packages widely used in transport, logistics, scheduling, telecommunications and medical treatment.

But Ms Harcourt was little recognised in Australia for her achievement. Although a Melbourne graduate, she did her research for the landmark paper — written with her collaborator Ailsa Land — at the London School of Economics.

Still without a doctorate, she returned to the University of Melbourne to lecture in statistics but found it difficult to find a supervisor, and the right topic, to go the next step to a PhD.

“At that time there might have been one or two other people ­interesting in linear programming. There was no mentor, no one to talk with. In retrospect, I think there were topics (for a PhD) I should have been aware of but I wasn’t,” Ms Harcourt said.

Looking back, she says she feels she was a little ahead of her time in the field.

In 1971 Ms Harcourt resigned from her post as a senior lecturer because she had a young family and, at that time, there was little support to care for young children and continue in a permanent academic role.

As Alison Doig, Ms Harcourt was profiled in Melbourne’s Sun in 1965.

But in 1979 she returned to the university’s statistics department as a part-time tutor and today, almost 40 years later, Ms Harcourt continues to tutor students and mark their papers, with few ever realising that she is the AG Doig (her name before marriage) who co-authored the famous 1960 paper An Automatic Method of Solving Discrete Programming Problems.

Ms Harcourt was nominated for the honorary doctorate by Professor Smith-Miles, who said the 1960 paper had “laid the foundations for a whole field”.

The paper introduced the “branch and bound” method, which made it faster for computers to solve optimisation problems by telling the program where to search for solutions and where not to search.

“That’s most deserving of a PhD,” Professor Smith-Miles said.

“I think it’s really appropriate that we finally acknowledge her contribution.”

Ms Harcourt’s doctor of science (honoris causa) is expected to be awarded at a ceremony in early December. It will be her second recent major honour, having been named two weeks ago as Victorian Senior Australian of the Year for 2019.

Also among her achievements is the distinction of having worked in the 1960s on Australia’s first systematic quantitative survey of poverty, which was the basis of the 1972 Henderson commission of inquiry into poverty.

Her work also led to a change in the Electoral Act in 1984 to ­improve the randomisation of the order of listing political parties on Senate voting papers.

University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell said Ms Harcourt’s story was ­remarkable.

“We are delighted to bestow the honorary PhD, which recognises Alison’s exceptional contributions over many decades,” he said.