For Ada Lovelace Day: Three Women in Computing
There are photos of three women in the computer lab at Meadowlark/Buena Vista: Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and Barbara Liskov.
Who are they? Why do I have their photos up?
Ada Lovelace, who lived in the early 1800s, is often billed as the first computer programmer. She designed a program to calculate Bernoulli numbers for Charles Babbage’s “analytical machine.” The program, like the machine, was never built.
What really intrigues me about Ada, however, is that she looked beyond what the machine was designed to do. She thought that it could do much more than crunch numbers. She thought it “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” That curiosity, that inquisitiveness, envisioning what else can be done is a trait I admire. These traits are shared by the two other women whose pictures sit by hers.
Grace Hopper, also known as Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper and “Amazing Grace,” was a computer scientist and US Naval Officer. Her long career includes credits for developing the first compiler for a programming language, making the term “debugging” (based a moth found in a computer relay) popular, and introducing the idea of machine-independent computer languages.
Barbara Liskov, winner of the 2009 Turing Award, first women to get a PhD in Computer Science, developer of the concept of data abstraction, her list of achievements goes on. Her current work is on distributed computing and the security of data. Her work on fault-tolerant systems has made technology easier for us all.
For all their frustrations, I love working with computers. I love to see what they can do and how we can use them in more ways than their designers intended. These three woman all saw beyond what was usual, found what could be possible, and envisioned beyond that too.
On Ada Lovelace Day, I salute them and all the women who see beyond the usual with computers.
