Grace Murray Hopper

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

She was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer (rear admiral, lower half). A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. She conceptualized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches (motivated by an actual moth removed from the computer). Owing to the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace." The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) is named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

[hlthe2b]

1. And a navy destroyer is named for her?

Why can't we at least get those public service announcements--you know the ones with shooting star that say: "the more you know" to do a series on these many notable women, of whom the general public knows nothing? So many fascinating women...

[Recursion]

2. Well, for what it's worth I guarantee every comp sci student has heard of her

Her work is legendary in the field, up there with Turing and Von Neumann. I'm not sure the general public would know what a compiler is in the first place, so knowing who invented them might not mean as much.

Interestingly, people thought her idea for a machine-independent computer language was laughable... then within 3 years, it had been ported to every system in operation at the time.

[ismnotwasm]

3. The name is vaguely familiar to me

But I wouldn't know why. I'm not computer savvy, but I read a lot of different things so I must have run across her name for something.

I'm a fan of Neal Stevensons "Cryptonomicon", so I thought that might be it, but its not.

The point problem is that so many non tech people have heard of Turing but so very few have heard of this woman.

Any other female's in the field you can think of? It's great to hear that she is well known in the Computer Science world.

[Recursion]

4. Ada Lovelace is another big one, and several more

She wrote the first computer program for a (never-finished) mechanical computer designed by Charles Babbage. She was also the first person to point out (in a letter to Parliament, who were asking why all the money they had given Babbage hadn't yet turned into a computer) that the outputs of a program could be considered either arithmetical or logical, depending on how the inputs were interpreted; if there's a fundamental theorem of computer science, that's it.

Another big name is Elizabeth Rather who invented the FORTH system which underlies many computer operating systems and controls about 85% of robots in use today. She has also been a huge contributer to computer science education, particularly early education. She should really get more attention than she does (and she's still alive, and talked to my 3rd grade comp sci class years ago).

Along those lines Adele Goldberg invented SmallTalk, the most important computer language in early childhood comp sci education today (it does what Logo did for my generation). And Mary Lou Jepsen founded the One Laptop Per Child initiative and was its CTO for years.

Mary Allen Wilkes invented the Personal Computer in the 1960s.

Radia Perlman created the Spanning Tree Protocol, probably the lynchpin of the modern Local Area Network.

Shafi Goldwasser is except possibly for Bruce Schneier the most widely respected theoretical cryptographer working today.

Finally, the famous 1930s actress Hedy Lamarr ("the most beautiful woman in Europe&quot was first and foremost an electrical engineer. She invented "frequency hopping", which is one of the crucial technologies underlying cell phones.

[Recursion]

5. In honor of Ms. Lamarr, a graphic:

[ismnotwasm]

6. Heh

Now that is pretty neat.

[ismnotwasm]

7. Thank you

That is completely awesome and I appreciate it.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

9. Thanks for these :)

Ada Lovelace's birthday is today.

See the google front page.

[Recursion]

12. Good catch!

At another point in the Parliamentary questions, an MP asked her "could the engine* still produce the correct totals if it were given incorrect information?"

She responded, "I cannot fathom the confusion of mind that would even lead to the Right Honorable Gentleman's question."

* i.e. the computer

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

13. :wink: If only the sarcasm tag had been available...

...in the 19th century. Today we just say "garbage in; garbage out" but her phrasing has so much more... character.

Thanks

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

14. BTW...

...I've read somewhere that Mil Std - 1815 on Ada is numbered deliberately with the year of her birth:
http://www.assistdocs.com/search/document_details.cfm?ident_number=37152&StartRow=1&PaginatorPageNumber=1&doc_number=1815&status_all=ON&search_method=BASIC

(just more trivia)

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

15. Here are some others

Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman worked on ENIAC
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC > (Each of these women has a link in the ENIAC article.)

Dana Ulery is an American computer scientist and pioneer in scientific computing applications.
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Ulery >

Jean E. Sammet is an American computer scientist who developed the FORMAC programming language in 1962.
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_E._Sammet >

Mary Allen Wilkes is a former computer programmer and hardware engineer, most known for her work with the LINC computer. She left computer science and became an attorney.
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Allen_Wilkes >

Karen Spärck Jones: One of her most important contributions was the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF) weighting in information retrieval, which she introduced in a 1972 paper. IDF is used in most search engines today, usually as part of the tf-idf weighting scheme.
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Sp%C3%A4rck_Jones >

Find more at:
< http://www.thenoisecast.com/2011/04/a-brief-timeline-of-influential-women-in-computing-history/ >

[ismnotwasm]

16. I just read 'When Computers Were Women"

As I have access to Project Muse. What a fascinating article.

One of the first women the army hired to work at the Moore School was twenty-two-year-old Kathleen McNulty. She had graduated in 1942 from Chestnut Hill College, in Philadephia, with one of the three math degrees awarded in her class. McNulty and her friend Frances Bilas answered an advertisement in a local paper that said Aberdeen was hiring mathematicians:

"I never heard of numerical integration. We had never done anything like that. Numerical integration is where you take, in this particular case . . . [the] path of a bullet from the time it leaves the muzzle of the gun until it reaches the ground. It is a very complex equation; it has about fifteen multiplications and a square root and I don't know what else. You have to find out where the bullet is every tenth of a second from the time it leaves the muzzle of the gun, and you have to take into account all the things that are going to affect the path of the bullet. The very first things that affect the path of the bullet [are] the speed at which it shoots out of the gun [the muzzle velocity], the angle at which it is shot out of the gun, and the size. That's all incorporated in a function which they give you--a [ballistic] coefficient.
As the bullet travels through the air, before it reaches its highest point, it is constantly being pressed down by gravity. It is also being acted upon by air pressure, even by the temperature. As the bullet reached a certain muzzle velocity--usually a declining muzzle velocity, because a typical muzzle velocity would be 2,800 feet per second [fps]--when it got down to the point of 1,110 fps, the speed of sound, then it wobbled terribly. . . . So instead of computing now at a tenth of a second, you might have broken this down to one one hundredth of a second to very carefully calculate this path as it went through there. [End Page 463] Then what you had to do, when you finished the whole calculation, you interpolated the values to find out what was the very highest point and where it hit the ground."


The work required a high level of mathematical skill, which included solving nonlinear differential equations in several variables: "Every four lines we had to check our computations by something called Simpson's rule to prove that we were performing the functions correctly. All of it was done using numbers so that you kept constantly finding differences and correcting back." 26 Depending upon their method, the computers could calculate a trajectory in somewhere between twenty minutes and several days, using the differential analyzer, slide rules, and desktop commercial calculators. 27 Despite the complexities of preparing firing tables, in this feminized job category McNulty's appointment was rated at a subprofessional grade. The BRL also categorized women like Lila Todd, a computer supervisor when McNulty started work at the Moore School, as subprofessional.

The New York Times of 15 February 1946 described Arthur Burks's public demonstration: "The ENIAC was then told to solve a difficult problem that would have required several weeks' work by a trained man. The ENIAC did it in exactly 15 seconds." 59 The "15 seconds" claim ignores the time women spent setting up each problem on the machine. Accompanying photographs of Eckert and Mauchly, the article reported that "the Eniac was invented and perfected by two young scientists of the [Moore] school, Dr. John William Mauchly, 38, a physicist and amateur meteorologist, and his associate, J. Presper Eckert Jr., 26, chief engineer on the project. Assistance was also given by many others at the school. . . . [The machine is] doing easily what had been done laboriously by many trained men. . . . Had it not been available the job would have kept busy 100 trained men for a whole year." 60 While this account alludes to the participation of many individuals other than Eckert and Mauchly, the hypothetical hundred are described as men. Why didn't the article report that the machine easily did calculations that would have kept one hundred trained women busy, since BRL and the Moore School hired women almost exclusively as computers? Even in an era when language defaulted to "he" in general descriptions, this omission is surprising, since the job of computer was widely regarded as women's work. 61 Women seem to have vanished from the ENIAC story, both in text and in photographs. One photograph accompanying the New York Times story foregrounds a man in uniform plugging wires into a machine. While the caption describes the "attendants preparing the machine to solve a hydrodynamical problem," the figures of two women in the background can be seen only by close scrutiny (fig. 1). Thus, the press conference and follow-up coverage rendered invisible both the skilled labor required to set up the demonstration and the gender of the skilled workers who did it.

"When Computers Were Women", by Jennifer S. Light


Edit to add another excerpt since I can't link. Wow, is about as articulate as I can get about this-- how very irritating. An unequaled opportunity to change to course of history for women in technology lost, perhaps on purpose.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

17. "subprofessional"

...sounds a bit prejudiced to me. Probably lots of guys were worried about their jobs. IIRC someone noted that women made fewer errors at this work than men.

Tables produced by the BRL (as I recall) are credited with significantly improving the accuracy of artillery in military engagements from Korea through the mid 1980s. One of the results being fewer civilian casualties.

(Trivia: After teaching for several years, my aunt (born in 1917) became the registrar at CHC. Their paths may have crossed.)

[ismnotwasm]

18. Apparently there is a documentary

"Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII" I haven't seen, and I'm hoping to find on Netflix today

Almost seventy years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, World War II still looms large in the U.S. historical consciousness. However, the enormous contributions of women to America’s war effort receive scant attention. While the work of women in industrial production, personified by the bicep-flexing Rosie the Riveter, often gets a perfunctory nod, the stories of the women who performed great feats of intellectual labor have not received the attention they deserve in both popular and scholarly accounts of the war.1
A big step in the right direction can be found in Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII, an hour-long documentary film produced and directed by LeAnn Erickson and written by Cynthia Baughman (PBS Distribution, 2010). Tightly edited and highly polished, the film mixes interviews with archival footage to tell the stories of several young women who were recruited by the military to work as human computers for the Philadelphia Computing Section, a secret operation run by the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory and housed within the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering. In short, the task of these women was to quickly and flawlessly carry out the enormous number of calculations necessary to construct accurate ballistics tables used to predict the flight paths of fired artillery shells, as well as bombs dropped from airplanes (figs. 1–2).

Interesting trivia about your Aunt!

Oh and once again thank you for your thread, looking further into this type of topic is right up my alley.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

19. It's available...

...on netflix and has 4+ stars.

You're welcome and have a nice evening.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

10. The USS Hopper...

...is the second U.S. Navy warship to be named for a woman from the Navy's own ranks. The other was the World War II destroyer USS Higbee named for the Superintendent of the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps during World War I, Lenah Higbee.

The USS Hopper was launched on 6 January 1996 sponsored by Mrs. Mary Murray Westcote, sister of the ship's namesake, Grace Murray Hopper.

IMHO, a series of educational spots on notable women would be a chance to provide an inspiring and educational message to everyone.



Trivia: The USS Hopper was referred to in the movie Battleship. A movie which incorporated a good deal of Computer-generated imagery (CGI). (A bit to much like transformers for my taste but not a bad movie.)

[hack89]

22. List of US military vessels named after women

There are five presently on active duty with one more coming soon (USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS-10))


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._military_vessels_named_after_women#Navy_ships

[Egalitarian Thug]

8. K&R for "Amazing" Grace. Too few people know her name. n/t

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

11. Thanks. Hopefully that will change.

[Shrek]

20. She's pretty much a legend in the computer science field

Any discussion of programming languages includes her work in some depth.

I also learned a lot about her when I attended the Naval Academy as she was a highly proficient naval officer.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

21. She had an incredible...

...43 year career including popularizing the programming term "bug".