As its International Women’s day, I thought I’d share a post about the Women who have shaped the modern world of IT that I wouldn’t be in a career without.
First up, we have Augusta Ada King – Countess of Lovelace – more commonly known as Ada Lovelace – Widely regarded as the author of the first published computer program
Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer who was born in 1815 in London – The only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron
Lovelace had a talent for mathematics, and worked on Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine in the 1840’s
She was the first person to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation
Between 1842 and 1843, Lovelace translated an article by the military engineer Luigi Menabrea, (who later became Prime Minister of Italy) about the Analytical Engine and supplemented it with a set of seven notes – labelled A-G. The seventh note contained what many consider to be the first computer program.
Lovelace died in 1852, aged 36.
Next we have Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler – more commonly known as the actress Hedy Lamarr.
Hedy was born in 1914 in Vienna and throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s stared in a number of films – her most well-known film was Samson and Delilah in 1949.
At the beginning of World War II, along with pianist and composer, George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the German forces.
Both of these systems are commonly used in Wireless systems such as mobile telephony and Wi-Fi nowadays to defeat signal intercept and eavesdropping
Lamarr died in 2000, aged 85
Now we have the American computer scientist, mathematician, and US Navy Rear Admiral – Grace Brewser Hopper.
Born in 1906, Hopper is most well-known in the world of IT for being the creator of the programming language COBOL in the 1960’s – A language still used in many mainframe systems around the world.
During her lifetime, Hopper was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world, a college at Yale University was renamed in her honour, and in 1991, she received the National Medal of Technology.
After her death in 1992 (aged 85), she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2016, and in 2024, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) dedicated a marker in honour of Grace Hopper at the University of Pennsylvania for her role in inventing the A-0 compiler during her time as a Lecturer in the School of Engineering.
In 2020, Google commissioned their 1st Transatlantic submarine cable – linking the US with Spain and the UK – They named the 6,300Km cable Grace Hopper.
As well as having an illustrious IT career, Hopper had an outstanding military career – Hopper was the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the United States Navy (79 years, eight months and five days).
Next we have Radia Joy Perlman – Born in 1951, and still living in the United States, Perlman is a computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in the development of the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the Internet.
Whilst working for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the 1980’s, Perlman invented a network protocol called Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) which is a system used to prevent network loops – which is a phenomena in Ethernet networks that could cause an Ethernet frame to never reach it’s destination and keep “bouncing” found a network forever. Many networks rely on STP to prevent congestion and latency issues.
Perlman has also provided much insight and knowledge to other networking protocols in use across the entire globe.
Perlman has held prestigious positions in some of the worlds most well-known IT organisations, including Bolt Beranek and Newman, DEC, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and Intel. She is currently a fellow at Dell technologies
Perlman holds over 100 patents in her name and was elected to the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014. Perlman holds the nickname of “Mother of the Internet”
Next we have Adele Goldberg – American computer scientist and inventor of the programming language smalltalk-80, a language which has influenced the design and operation of modern-day computer languages including Python, C, and Java.
Born in 1945, Goldberg still lives in the US, and has had a very illustrious career.
In the 1970’s she worked at the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) – Formerly Xerox PARC, and it was here she developed the Smalltalk-80 language with a small group of co-workers.
In 1976, she wrote the influential article “Personal Dynamic Media“, which predicted a world in which people would use notebook computers to exchange, modify, and redistribute personal media – this is regarded as being very influential in the development of modern-day laptops, PDA’s, and ultimately the modern-day smartphone
The concepts devised by Goldberg for Smalltalk became the basis for modern-day Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), and in the 1980’s Steve Jobs demanded a demonstration of the Smalltalk System which Apple eventually used as the basis for their Apple Macintosh desktop environment.
We now have Karen Spärck Jones, a British computer scientist, who is responsible for the concept of Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines.
Born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, Spärck Jones was educated in Huddersfield, and Cambridge – It was during her time at Cambridge that she met Margaret Masterman – linguist and philosopher, known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation.
Masterman inspired Spärck Jones to pursue a career in computer science – a career she followed until her death in 2007, aged 71
Spärck Jones worked at the Cambridge Language Research Centre between the 1950’s and the 1970’s before moving to the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory where she worked until retirement in 2002.
Throughout her life, Spärck Jones published nine books and multiple papers on various computing topics, however, it is her work in natural language processing and information retrieval where she has most accolades.
In 1964, Spärck Jones published her paper entitled “Synonymy and Semantic Classification“, which is now seen as a foundational paper in the field of natural language processing. 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 term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) weighting scheme.
Spärck Jones received many awards throughout her career, including:
- Gerard Salton Award (1988)
- Elected a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1993
- President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 1994
- Honorary degree of Doctor of Science from The City University in 1997
- Elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), where she also served as Vice-President in 2000–2002
- Fellow of European Association for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI)
- Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Award of Merit (2002)
- Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Lifetime Achievement Award (2004)
- ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award (2006)
- BCS Lovelace Medal (2007)
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Women’s Group Athena Award (2007)
In 2008, the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the British Computer Society established an annual Karen Spärck Jones Award in her honour, to encourage and promote research that advances understanding of Natural Language Processing or Information Retrieval.
In August 2017, the University of Huddersfield renamed one of its campus buildings in her honour.
Finally, we have Elizabeth Jocelyn Feinler – a US information scientist, and one of the founding scientists of the ARPANET – the forerunner of the Internet.
Born in 1931, Feinler joined the Information Research Department in the 1960’s at the Stanford Research Institute where she worked to develop the Handbook of Psychopharmacology and the Chemical Process Economics Handbook. It was here where she was recruited to work at ARPA where her first task was to write a Resource Handbook for the first demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference.
By 1974 she was the principal investigator to help plan and run the new Network Information Center (NIC) for the ARPANET.
In 1982, an Internet protocol was defined by Ken Harrenstien and Vic White in her group to access the online directory of people, called Whois.
As the Internet expanded, the Domain Name System (DNS) was designed to handle the growth by delegating naming authority to distributed name servers. Feinler’s group became the overall naming authority of the Internet, developing and managing the name registries of the top-level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .edu, .org, and .com.
In 2012, Feinler was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society, and in July, 2013 she received the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award “for her contributions to the early development and administration of the Internet through her leadership of the Network Information Center (NIC) for the ARPANET“.
There are many, many more Women who have been, and continue to be hugely influential in the the world of IT and computing that I have not mentioned here – my choices for this post have been specifically of those who have had a direct impact on my career – and I thank each, and every one of them for being the driving forces that they were that enabled me to have the successful career I have.
