Born: 24 November 1929, Australia
Died: NA
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Alison Doig
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Statistician Dr. Alison Harcourt is best known for co-defining the branch and bound algorithm—a way of solving optimisation problems by breaking them into smaller problems—with Ailsa Land. Her work on poverty in Australia was just starting to gain traction as a way to calculate the poverty line, when she gave up academia. “At the end of 1971, which was just after the poverty survey had sort of got to Canberra and had been noted, I resigned from the university because I had started a family,” she later said.