During Women’s Week, we had to pay tribute to the great women who have made history in technology. We’ve chosen some incredible women to bring you a bit of their story.
We would like to inspire more incredible women to follow this field, which currently tends to be mostly made up of men. Let’s go?
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)
Alan Turing is considered the father of computing, but it was Ada Lovelace who actually came up with the idea for the first computer program.
In the mid-19th century, the famous Countess de Lovelace analyzed and translated various materials from contemporary mathematicians. This study helped to develop the world’s first algorithm.
At Lovelace’s time, he didn’t have machines at his disposal that could test these codes and prove that his logic was correct, but Ada’s discovery was later tested and proven years after her death when computers with the ability to process this type of algorithm already existed. She is now considered the mother of computing.
A programming language called Ada was created in his honor and an award in his name for people who develop innovations in this area.
Carol Shaw
Attention video game lovers, you will find Carol Shaw’s story incredible. Born in Silicon Valley in 1955, she is considered to be the first woman to start working in digital game development.
Carol Shaw created software for games and consoles, pioneering procedural content generation, which is nothing more than gradually increasing the difficulty of game levels.
In several of his works, one stage was completely different from the next, a concept still used today in the biggest game titles.
As a result, the computer engineer was one of Atari’s first employees, also working for companies such as Activision.
Among his main contributions are games:
- River Raid;
- Othello;
- 3D Tic Tac Toe;
- Super Breakout;
- Pole;
- Happy Trails
Incredible, huh?
Frances Allen (1932 – 2020)
Frances Allen was a mathematician who had a major impact on computer science. The sector in which he excelled was compiler optimization.
With his discoveries, it was possible to create code improvement and parallel computing systems. This has led to a lot of software working optimally, even on low-performance processors.
For her contributions, she became the first woman to receive the Turing Award, at the age of 74.
Frances Allen also worked at the National Security Agency (NSA), creating digital security systems.
Roberta Williams
Williams was the co-founder of one of the main companies in the games industry, Sierra, which later merged with Activision.
After being introduced to the text-based Adventure game, Roberta Williams had the idea of developing games with visual content, creating Mistery House, one of her first major works.
His idea was a revolution in game design, influencing many creations.
The company founded with her husband, Ken Williams, was responsible for creating several well-known titles, such as Phantasmagoria and King’s Quest.
Grace Hopper
Do you have any idea where the term “bug” came from? Term used to refer to problems in computer systems.
Apparently, it came into use after Grace Hopper solved a data processing error by removing an insect (called a “bug” in English) from inside a machine.
Of course, there were other contributions from this incredible woman. Hopper was the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics at Yale University. He has also worked in the field of technology within the US Navy.
She was also one of the creators of one of the most widely used programming languages for business databases, COBOL. He also contributed to the creation of the first computer marketed in the United States, the UNIVAC.
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson, in addition to completing her first degrees in mathematics and French at the age of 18, was also the first black woman to enter a graduate program at West Virginia State University.
His ideas led him to work at NACA, a body that would later become NASA.
One of his main contributions was the calculation of the flight path for the Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon. Part of his story can be seen in the movie “Stars Beyond Time”.
It’s important to remember that most of these figures developed at a time when it was difficult for women to gain access to higher education.
Margaret Heafield Hamilton
Computer scientist, software engineer and entrepreneur. She was director of the Software Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed the flight program used in the Apollo 11 project, the first manned mission to the Moon. Hamilton’s software prevented the moon landing from being aborted.
Margaret published more than 130 articles, minutes and reports related to the 60 projects and 6 major programs in which she was involved.
On November 22, 2016, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Barack Obama. Honor for his work developing the flight software on board NASA’s Apollo missions.
He graduated from Hancock High School in 1954 and studied mathematics at the University of Michigan. He graduated in Mathematics from Earlham College in the state of Indiana (USA) in 1958 and did postgraduate studies in Meteorology at MIT ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Soon after graduating, she taught high school math and French, but only for a short time, while her husband finished his degree. Margaret and James Cox Hamilton met at Earlham College and married around the end of the 1950s and had a daughter. Soon after, the couple divorced.
She moved to Boston, Massachusetts to pursue a graduate degree in pure mathematics at Brandeis University. In 1960 he took up an interim position at MIT to develop climate prediction programs on computers.
“Mostly men were working there, and they have someone at home to look after their children. I had no choice… I would bring my daughter, Lauren, to work on evenings and weekends and she would see me ‘playing’ astronaut to test the kind of things astronauts do. So she wanted to do that too and she played astronaut.” (Margaret Hamilton)
Although today women are increasingly present in various sectors, there is still a long way to go in terms of struggle, respect and opportunity to level the gender playing field in the job market.
Master da Web would like to pay tribute to all these great women and say that: A woman’s place is wherever she wants to be!
