The most famous woman in IT

On February, 21 the Association for Computing Machinery (acm.org) declared the name of the laureate of the Prize – one of the most prestige science award in the IT sphere. For the first time the laureate of this award was a woman – a 75 year-old Frances Allen. She has worked for IBM since 1975. Missis Allen took part in research-and-development activities in the field of parallel computing, that is used in most computing machinery.

In 1989 г. Allen was the first woman who got oneself into the list of the IBM Fellow – the most prestigious technical status in the corporation.

The example of Frances Allen isn’t the only example of a woman who achieved success in the IT sphere.

Many critics think that the first developer was a woman. Lovelace Augusta Ada King had become a programmer long before the first computers were invented. She was a mathematician and she was interested in the works of Charles Bebbidge who created the project “Analytical engine“ – theoretical footing of the first computer creation. Lovelace translated from French to English the famous work of Menabrea in 1842 and added her comments to it. Her comments to this work were very useful for the science development – there were a lot of methods of practical application of computers and argumentation about entertaining application of computers. Also Ada wrote her own method of Bernulli numbers’ calculation , that is known as the first famous computer program. Ada is the author of such terms in modern programming as subprogramme, circle, working cell and etc.