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and dedicated proponent of the application of mathematical and computer techniques to the field of biochemistry. As a pioneer in scientific computer technology, she dedicated her 37-year career to harnessing the revolution in computer technology for advances in medicine and biology. Among her many contributions to science, she seemed most pleased with the computerized protein and DNA sequence databases, which were developed because of her research interests in molecular evolution. From them flowed advances in our understanding of the origins of life and of macromolecular evolution, as well as a large number of practical applications in the healing sciences including the production of useful substances through genetic engineering. It was of special importance to her for her databases to be the best of their kind. Thus they supported both her own research interests and those of science scholars as a whole.
She was born Margaret Belle Oakley in Philadelphia on 11 March 1925. She moved to New York City at about the age of 10, where she attended public school and was valedictorian of the class of 1942 at Bayside High School. She was awarded a scholarship to Washington Square College of New York University, from which she graduated in 1945 magna cum laude, with honors in mathematics.
Her research began with a Ph.D. in 1948 in quantum chemistry, under Professor George Kimball, at the Columbia University Department of Chemistry. In her thesis research, she pioneered the application of mass data processing equipment for theoretical chemical calculations (Dayhoff and Kimball, 1949). She devised a method of using punched-card business machines to calculate the molecular resonance energies of several polycyclic organic molecules. Due to the amount of computation needed, such calculations were considered to be infeasible without the use of punched-card machines. The machines she used were regarded aS high technology in 1947, just before the emergence of programmable computers for scientific uses. It is interesting that the primary reason for using the "punched-card machines" was to make possible the finding of the principal eigenvatue of a "large" matrix by the iteration method.
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