Schalk NeethlingCelebrating the trailblazers and pioneers who have shaped the technology landscape, this post shines a light on the remarkable contributions of seven influential women. From Ada Lovelace, considered the world's first computer programmer, to Dr. Joy Buolamwini, a leading researcher in algorithmic bias, their stories are a testament to the power of determination, innovation, and the pursuit of progress.
Through their groundbreaking work, these women have not only left an indelible mark on the field of technology but also paved the way for future generations, inspiring others to follow in their footsteps and make a lasting impact on the world around them.
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace (also Ada Byron, and Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace) was born on December 10, 1815, in London, England. The daughter of Lord Byron a famous English poet, Ada’s father played little to no role in her life and was instead raised primarily by her doting maternal grandmother Judith, Hon. Lady Milbanke.
At twelve years of age, Ada was spellbound by the idea of human flight. She started by exploring different materials such as paper, oilsilk, wires, and feathers for the wings, studied the anatomy of birds, and ended up noting down all of her findings in a book titled, “Flyology”. Later in life, she became friends with the Scottish polymath, Mary Sommerville, who introduced her to Charles Babbage.
This meeting would prove influential as Babbage introduced her to his prototype of the difference machine and later the Analytical Engine. It was her extensive notes that accompanied her translation of the mathematician Luigi Menabrea's article on said machine that got her noticed. Especially in Note G, where she included in great detail a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine. It is this method that is believed to be the first algorithm specifically meant to be executed on a computer such as the Analytical Engine. Unfortunately, the machine was never completed so her algorithm was never tested.
However, Ada’s belief that these machines could be used for more than mere calculations set the stage for modern programming and computing. Ada struggled with illness all her life and succumbed to cancer at the age of 36.
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[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
Grace Hopper
Grace Brewster Hopper was born on December 9, 1906, in New York City, New York. Grace was a mathematician, computer scientist, and United States Navy rear admiral who believed that programming should be simplified with an English-based computer programming language. To realize this Grace wrote a compiler that would take English words and compile them to machine code that the computer could understand.
During wartime, Grace co-authored three papers on Harvard Mark 1 and was also credited with the first computer manual titled, “A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator.” In 1954 Grace was chosen by Eckert–Mauchly to lead the Department of Automatic Programming in the release of one of the first compiled languages, FLOW-MATIC. Only five years later, Grace participated in the CODASYL consortium consulting them on creating a machine-independent programming language. This came full circle with the invention of the COBOL (which stands for COmmon Business-Oriented Language) language, a language based on English words.
Not someone to sit still, Grace advocated for the replacement of large centralized systems at the Defense Department with small, distributed computers. This would allow any user on any computer node to access any common database located on the network (sound familiar?). She was also an advocate for standards leading the development and implementation of standards for testing computer systems. Most notably for early programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL.
It is therefore ironic that she would be part of the team that, while working on the Mark II, discovered a moth stuck in a relay, impeding the operation of the computer. While nobody was said to have coined the word “debugging” on that day, a note on the log sheet for the day did read, “First actual case of bug being found”.
Grace passed away in her sleep of natural causes on New Year’s Day in 1992 in Virginia at the age of 85. She received over 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world and more awards than I can mention here.
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"Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counterclockwise."
Margaret Hamilton
Margaret Elaine Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana on August 17, 1936. Margaret studied mathematics, earning a BA, and a minor in philosophy inspired by her poet and grandfather. In 1959 she started working at the meteorological department at MIT. This is also where she developed weather prediction software, and programming on the LGP-30 and PDP-1 computers at Marvin Minsky’s (co-founder of the AI lab at MIT) Project MAC.
From 1961 - 1963 Margaret worked on the SAGE (Semi-Automic Ground Environment) project and was part of the team of programmers working on the Q7, a computerized air defence command and control system. She also worked on satellite tracking software at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories. The SAGE project was part of the larger Project Whirlwind, started at MIT to develop a weather prediction system that could track the system’s movement using simulators. On the SAGE project Margaret, like many other “beginners”, was assigned to work on a system that nobody was ever able to figure out or even run. All the comments were in either Greek or Latin! But, with determination, Margaret did not only get it to work but got it to print out its answers in the same Greek and Latin.
It is this work that ensured that she would be the leading candidate for the lead developer position at NASA working on Apollo flight software. Margeret was indeed hired as the first programmer on the Apollo flight software project and later became the Director of the Software Engineering Division. Her team was not only responsible for writing and testing all on-board in-flight software for the Apollo spacecraft but also error detection and recovery software including the Priority Displays which Margaret designed and developed.
Among the many awards Margaret received was the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award which she received in 1986 awarded by the Association for Women in Computing. Margaret also founded two businesses and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2016.
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Margaret invented the term “software engineering” we take as par for the course today:
"I began to use the term 'software engineering' to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process."
Learn more about Margaret Hamilton
Radia Perlman
Radia Joy Perlman was born in Portsmouth, Virginia on December 18, 1951. Radia is affectionately known as the “Mother of the Internet” having invented the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges. Radia’s parents were both engineers for the US government with her father working on radar and her mother a programmer.
A pioneer in teaching children to program, Radia developed a child-friendly version of the education robotics language LOGO called TORTIS which is an acronym that stands for, “Toddler's Own Recursive Turtle Interpreter System”. It was at LOGO lab at MIT that Radia found her first employment as a part-time programmer working on systems software such as debuggers. It was while Radia was at Digital Equipment Corp. that she developed STP. STP allows for network design that takes into account redundant links in the network by providing automatic backup paths and disabling links which is no longer part of the path. All this work led her to author the textbook, “Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols” and later co-authored “Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World” which is now a popular college textbook.
Radia also wrote a poem as an ode to STP called Algorhyme:
Algorhyme
I think that I shall never see
A graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial property
Is loop-free connectivity.
A tree which must be sure to span
So packets can reach every LAN.
First the root must be selected.
By ID it is elected.
Least cost paths from root are traced.
In the tree these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me
Then bridges find a spanning tree.
Radia worked at Novell and later moved on to Sun Microsystems, now Oracle. Radia holds over 80 patents and has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the Internet Hall of Fame among many other awards.
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It was in high school that Radia learned programming and started to consider that something related to computers could be part of her career. About this time she remarked:
"I was not a hands-on type person. It never occurred to me to take anything apart. I assumed I'd either get electrocuted, or I'd break something"
Learn more about Radia Perlman
Hedy Lamarr
Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, Hedy Lamarr was born on November 9, 1914, in Vienna, Austria. While Hedy was known as a celebrity and actress she had always shown an interest in invention. While she was fascinated with film and theatre and showed an interest in acting as a child, she also learned about technological invention thanks to her father. Her father would often take her on walks and would explain to her how various devices worked.
While working as an actress, she invested her spare time (even during breaks between takes) designing and drafting inventions. These included an improved stop light and a tablet which, when dissolved in water, would create a flavored carbonated drink.
But it was in the late 1930’s that Hedy along with friend and composer George Antheil worked on what would later become the underpinning of modern Wifi and Bluetooth technology. Hedy, having learned that torpedoes would greatly benefit from a guidance system explored the idea of frequency hopping as a means to overcome the inherent problem of radio frequency jamming that would otherwise make radio-controlled guidance systems prone to attack.
This idea resonated with George as he worked on synchronized note-hopping for an avant-garde composition involving multiple synchronized player pianos. Together they realized that the same idea could be used with radio frequencies but in a miniaturized form. Despite initial support, the U.S. Navy rejected their invention, deeming it impractical. Decades later, Lamarr and Antheil were recognized with awards for their innovative contribution which, as mentioned earlier, underpins modern Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies.
On November 9 2015 and 2023, Google honored her with a Google doodle.
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“All creative people want to do the unexpected.”
Frances Allen
Frances Elizabeth Allen was born in Peru, New York on August 4, 1932. Frances grew up on a farm and went to school in a one-room schoolhouse a mile away from her house. She later went to a local high school going on to graduate from the New York State College for Teacher with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics. After two years of teaching school in Peru, New York she enrolled at the University of Michigan and earned a Master of Science degree in mathematics.
Being deeply in debt with student loans (there has to be a better way), she joined IBM Research meaning to return to teaching once her student loans have been paid. She ended up spending her entire 45-year career at IBM (not because of the student loans). At IBM she worked on everything from code breaking with the NSA as part of Project Harvest to her seminal work on optimizing compilers with John Cocke. The Harvest and Stretch projects, often referred to as Harvest-Stretch, was a top-secret project between IBM and the NSA to build a supercomputer that would be capable of analyzing communications intercepted by listening posts operated by American spies around the globe
Frances has been awarded a slew of awards among them being the first woman to be awarded the Turning award. She received this award for her contributions in the area of high-performance computing specifically around optimizing compilers. In 2002 she was awarded the Augusta Ada Lovelace award and was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow. When accepting the IBM Fellow award Frances noticed that the plaque read, “In recognition and appreciation of his outstanding technical contributions…”, incorrectly identifying her as a man. The award along with the mistake remained on her wall until she retired from IBM in 2002.
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Not a quote from Frances but about her from a colleague Jeanne Ferrante:
“One the many things Fran did was attract women to her field. She looked out for the people who were underrepresented.”
Learn more about Frances Allen
Dr. Joy Buolamwini
Born Joy Adowaa Buolamwini in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in either 1989 or 1990. Joy, also known as the Poet of Code, grew up in Mississippi and attended school at Cordova High School in Cordova, Tennessee. At age nine, inspired by Kismet the MIT robot, she taught herself HTML, JavaScript, and PHP and went on to study computer science at Georgia Tech where she researched health informatics among her many educational accolades.
In 2011 she worked with the trachoma program. Trachoma is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium that causes roughening of the inner surface of the eyelid causing pain and eventual blindness. As part of the program at the Carter Centre, they developed an Android-based assessment system for use in Ethiopia.
Joy is a researcher at MIT Media Lab and a member of the Center for Civic Media. She is well known for her work in investigating algorithmic bias, notably through her project Gender Shades. Gender Shades originated from a project where she showed 1,000 faces to facial recognition systems and asked them to identify whether the faces were male or female. Through this experiment, she discovered that the system had very low accuracy in correctly identifying the faces of dark-skinned women. In 2018 she wrote a paper titled, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification” which led to IBM and Microsoft taking notice and taking steps to improve their facial recognition systems.
Joy founded the Algorithmic Justice League to combat code bias and has influenced tech giants and policy, including advising on President Biden's Executive Order 14110 known as the Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Joy is prolific and has been involved with many projects such as Voicing Erasure as part of the Algorithmic Justice League website, The Coded Gaze mini-documentary, being featured in the documentary Coded Bias, numerous exhibitions, and released her book, “Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines” in 2023.
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“The rising frontier for civil rights will require algorithmic justice. AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.”
Learn more about Dr. Joy Buolamwini
Conclusion
This is but a molecular sample of seven women in technology who have made or are making a lasting difference in the world and the technological landscape. I hope these little snippets of their lives have sparked curiosity in some and inspired others to follow in their footsteps no matter what gender you are or where on this beautiful planet you happen to find yourself.
It is in all of our grasp to make a difference, we just need to believe in ourselves, stand up for what we believe in, and add our voice to the cosmopolitan world we share with more than 8 billion others. The future of our planet and our lives are in our hands, let’s not waste it. Put down what weighs you down and instead try to make a difference, no matter how big or small.
Thank you for reading. Who has inspired you? Please share in the comments. I cannot wait to read, learn, and be inspired.
