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During the early 1940's, Kay McNulty, a recent math graduate from
Chestnut Hill College, was employed along with about 75 other young
female mathematicians as a "computer" by the University of
Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering. These "computers" were
responsible for making calculations for tables of firing and
bombing trajectories, as part of the war effort. The need to perform
the calculations more quickly prompted the development of the ENIAC,
the world's first electronic digital computer, in 1946. Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli recalls computing in 1946: "We did have desk calculators at that time, mechanical and driven with electric motors, that could do simple arithmetic. You'd do a multiplication and when the answer appeared, you had to write it down to reenter it into the machine to do the next calculation. We were preparing a firing table for each gun, with maybe 1,800 simple trajectories. To hand-compute just one of these trajectories took 30 or 40 hours of sitting at a desk with paper and a calculator. As you can imagine, they were soon running out of young women to do the calculations. Actually, my title working for the ballistics project was `computer.' The idea was that I not only did arithmetic but also made the decision on what to do next. ENIAC made me, one of the first `computers,' obsolete.On computing in 1996, Kay says: I love that it's a perfectly normal thing for kids. My 5-year-old granddaughter is not amazed by computers at all. I guess the amazement will come when she realizes it won't do everything in the world.
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Information from Wikipedia and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. |
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During World War II, a large number of female mathematicians were
employed as "computers" to perform calculations necessary to create
firing and bombing tables. Alice Burks was one of 75 female
"computers" working at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School
of Engineering. Eventually, the need to perform the calculations more
rapidly led to the development of the ENIAC, the world's first
electronic digital computer.Alice Burks has coauthored numerous articles on ENIAC and the history of computers with her husband, Arthur Burks, a computer scientist who was part of the ENIAC team.
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Edith Clarke, born in a small farming community in Maryland, went
to Vassar College at age eighteen to study mathematics and
astronomy and graduated in 1908 with honors and as a Phi Beta Kappa.
Subsequently, she taught mathematics at a private girls' school in
San Francisco, and then at Marshall College in Huntington, W. Va. In
the fall of 1911, Edith enrolled as a civil engineering student at the
University of Wisconsin. At the end of her first year, she took a
summer job as a "Computor Assistant" (skilled mathematician) to AT&T
research engineer Dr. George Campbell and was so interested in the
computing work that she did not return to her studies,
but instead stayed on at AT&T to train and direct a group of
computors.In 1918, Edith left to enroll in the EE program at MIT, earning her MSc. degree (the first degree ever awarded by that department to a woman) in June 1919. In 1919, she took a job as a computor for GE in Schenectady, NY, and in 1921 filed a patent for a "graphical calculator" to be employed in solving electric power transmission line problems. Also in 1921, she took a leave from GE to take a position as a professor of physics at the U.S.-founded Constantinople Women's College in Turkey. Returning to GE in 1922 as a salaried electrical engineer, Edith continued there till her first retirement in 1945. In 1947, after a brief first retirement on a farm in Maryland, she accepted an EE professorship at the University of Texas, Austin, and became the first woman to teach engineering there. She worked there as a full professor until her second retirement in 1956. In a March 14, 1948 interview by the Daily Texan, she commented on the future prospects for women in engineering: "There is no demand for women engineers, as such, as there are for women doctors; but there's always a demand for anyone who can do a good piece of work." A New York Times article of Feb. 19, 1956, said, "She believes that women may help solve today's critical need for technical manpower." Dr. James E. Brittain's paper, "From Computor to Electrical Engineer--the Remarkable Career of Edith Clarke," sheds light on how she was a pioneer for women in both engineering and computing: "Edith Clarke's engineering career had as its central theme the development and dissemination of mathematical methods that tended to simplify and reduce the time spent in laborious calculations in solving problems in the design and operation of electrical power systems. She translated what many engineers found to be esoteric mathematical methods into graphs or simpler forms during a time when power systems were becoming more complex and when the initial efforts were being made to develop electromechanical aids to problem solving. As a woman who worked in an environment traditionally dominated by men, she demonstrated effectively that women could perform at least as well as men if given the opportunity. Her outstanding achievements provided an inspiring example for the next generation of women with aspirations to become career engineers."
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Mary Ann Davidson is the Chief Security Officer at Oracle Corp. Davidson studied mechanical engineering at the University of Virginia and earned an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvannia. She also served as an officer in the Navy where she was awarded the Navy Achievement Medal. Davidson is an influencial voice and corporate expert in the software security and cyber security community. In her free time she enjoys skiing and surfing. Information from: Oracle Excecutive Biographies and Business Week. |
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Carly Fiorina was a chairman of the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2000-2005 and CEO of
Hewlett-Packard from 1999-2005. She was named the most powerful woman in business by Fortune
magazine from 1998-2003. Carly went to Stanford University for her undergraduate in philosophy
and medieval history and earned her MBA at the Robert H. Smith School of Business
at the University of Maryland. She received her MS in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Currently she is a director at the Revolution Health Group and is on the board
of Cybertrust, a large computer security firm.
Information from: Wikipedia |
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Alexandra Illmer Forsythe studied mathematics in college
and graduate school, and then became interested in computing. During
the 1960's and 1970's, she co-authored a series of textbooks on
computer science, published by Wiley & Sons and Academic Press.
Her first was the first textbook written in CS. Among
her books were:
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"Fox graduated from Wisconsin State College in 1940. She
joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943 and was stationed at the
Naval Research Station in Washington. She continued to work
there as an electronics engineer in radar after her discharge
in 1946. In 1951 she joined the National Bureau of Standards
as a member of the technical staff of the Electronic Computer
Laboratory. Later, she joined the Research Information Center
and Advisory Service on Information Processing (RICASIP) where
she was involved in producing reviews and bibliographies.
From 1966 to 1975 Fox was chief of the Office of Computer
Information in the NBS Institute for Computer Science and
Technology. Fox was involved in several professional groups, especially the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the American Federation for Information Processing Societies (AFIPS). She was the first secretary of AFIPS." Quoted from: Margaret Fox Papers (CBI 45), Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. |
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Adele Goldstine was the wife of Dr. Herman Goldstine, who assisted in
the creation of the ENIAC, the world's first electronic digital
computer, at UPenn in the 1940's. Adele Goldstine made an indelible
contribution to the ENIAC project herself by authoring the Manual for
the ENIAC in 1946. This original technical description of the
ENIAC detailed the machine right down to its resistors.
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Evelyn Boyd Granville, who earned her doctorate in Mathematics in 1949
from Yale University, was one of the first African American women to earn
a Ph.D. in Mathematics.
During her career, she developed computer programs that were used for
trajectory analysis in the Mercury Project (the first U.S. manned mission
in space) and in the Apollo Project (which sent U.S. astronauts to the
moon).
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Erna Schneider earned a B.A. with honors in medieval history from
Wellesley College, and later a Ph.D. in the philosophy and foundations
of mathematics from Yale University.
In 1954, after teaching for a number of years at Swarthmore College, she
began a research career at Bell Laboratories. While there,
she invented a computerized switching system for telephone traffic,
to replace existing hard-wired, mechanical switching equipment.
For this ground-breaking achievement -- the principles of which are
still used today -- she was awarded one of the first
software patents ever issued
(Patent #3,623,007, Nov. 23, 1971) . At Bell Labs, she became the
first female supervisor of a technical department.
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From Wikipedia:
"Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939) is a prominent computer scientist. She is currently the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, and became the first woman in the United States to be awarded a PhD in Computer Science, in 1968 from Stanford University. Barbara Liskov has led many significant projects, including the design and implementation of CLU, the first programming language to support data abstraction, Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs, and Thor, an object-oriented database system." |
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Rósa Péter studied mathematics at Loránd Eötvös
University in Budapest, graduating in 1927 and beginning her career as
a tutor. From 1945 until her retirement in 1975, she was a professor
of mathematics, for 10 years at Budapest Teachers Training College and
subsequently at Loránd Eötvös University. From the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive: Her first research topic was number theory, but she became discouraged on finding that her results had already been proved by Dickson. For a while Rósa wrote poetry, but around 1930 she was encouraged to return to mathematics by Kalmár. He suggested Rósa examine Gödel's work, and in a series of papers she became a founder of recursive function theory. Rósa wrote Recursive Functions in 1951, which was the first book on the topic and became a standard reference. In 1952 Kleene described Rósa Péter in a paper in Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. as ``the leading contributor to the special theory of recursive functions." From the mid 1950's she applied recursive function theory to computers. In 1976 her last book was on this topic: Recursive Functions in Computer Theory. |
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Meg Whitman has been the CEO of the popular online auction site eBay since March 1998 taking
the company from fewer than 100 employees to over 9,000 employees world wide.
Meg also was named the most powerful woman in business by Fortune magazine in 2004.
She earned a Bachelor of Economics from Princeton University and a Master of Business Administration from
Harvard Business School.
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"Joan Margaret Winters began working in Computer Services at
Cornell University in 1970. She later became Coordinator for
User Support, a position that included managing the office's
consulting and educational functions. While at Cornell
Winters also designed and implemented SPINDEX II applications
for the Department of Manuscripts and University Archives.
In 1980 Winters took a position as a scientific programmer in
SLAC Computing Services at the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center. In the mid-1970s Winters became active in SHARE, an International Business Machines (IBM) computer user group. In 1976 she joined SHARE's Human Factors Project, a group dedicated to educating members of SHARE and employees of IBM about the importance of human factors in the design of hardware and, especially, software and conducting research into human factors and software appraisal tools. Winters became deputy manager of the project in 1978 and served as project manager from 1983 to 1987. She also served on the Interactive Systems (INTERSYS) Task Force from 1979-1982 and was a primary author of the task force's report. She became vice chair of the ASCII/EPCDIC Committee (later, a task force) in 1987 and manager of the Integrated Technology Group in 1988. Winters also belonged to the Human Factors Society and the Association for Computing Machinery." Quoted from: Joan M. Winters Papers (CBI 22), Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. |
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Anita Borg was born on January 17, 1949 and was one of the few female computer scientists with a PH.D in 1981 when she received
her graduate degree from New York University. After attending an industry conference in 1987 she realized how few women
attended conferences so she began Systers, an email list community of mentors providing information and support for women in computing.
She also was the founding director of the Institute of Women and Technology later renamed in her honor to the
