British physicist who designed and produced an electronic stored-program computer at the University of London. During World War II, while working as a mathematical physicist, he was researching crystalline structure using x-ray diffraction data. This work required tedious complex mathematical calculations and provided an incentive to develop an automatic calculator. Booth designed and produced the Automatic Relay Computer (ARC) during 1947-49 at the Birkbeck College computation laboratory at the University of London.