Computing

Their stories are interesting and inspiring

Some think women don’t understand technology. However, this is far from the case and the proof is in the fact that there are many women professionals who have proven their worth in a wide variety of professions. We present to you a few of the most stunning ladies who have left their name in the history of programming:

Countess Ada Lovelace

Have you heard of her? She’s the daughter of the great poet George Byron. And shocking as it may be, she was the world’s first computer programmer. She was born in London in 1815. As a little girl, Ada loved to curl up in some secluded corner with a pen and a notebook. Her mother feared that her daughter had inherited her father’s literary talent and would carry on his work. Ada, however, was not interested in poetry at all-she was obsessed with the idea of the airplane she was designing.

When she was 17, Ada met mathematician Charles Babbage, who is known as the inventor of the first computer. The girl translated Babbage’s work, Elements of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Interestingly, the translation itself was accompanied by her personal explanations of 52 pages, writes iskamdaznam.

Among other things, she describes the algorithm for calculating Bernoulli’s numbers in order for the computer to understand them. Her calculation sequence can safely be considered the first computer program. Many of the girl’s ideas became the basis for the development of modern programming. In her notes, things like “work cell”, “subroutine”, “loop” are mentioned for the first time in the world.

Grace Hopper

As a child, she was famous for her proverbial curiosity. She remained so. Little Grace dismantled seven alarm clocks – quite puzzling her mother with these actions. Because of her father’s illness, she didn’t want to be another American wife who would be nothing more than a housewife. A decent dowry, however, was not as important as a good education. Therefore, the father chose the latter, which determined his daughter’s fate. The talented Grace Hopper quickly earned her doctorate at Yale. When World War II began, the girl went to serve in the Navy. In 1943, she was transferred to the Artillery Computer Bureau at Harvard University. She was among the first programmers of the Mark I computer. Grace Hopper created the COBOL programming language, which is still current. She first used the term “bug” in her bug report.

Marisa Mayer

Mayer breaks all existing stereotypes about female intelligence by becoming CEO of Yahoo! She was born into a family of an engineer and an artist in 1975 in Wisconsin, USA. After graduating with an MBA from Stanford, she began working at Google, where she became the first female software engineer. Later she worked from one department to another, doing web design, dealing with management, marketing, staff training. As a result, the indefatigable blonde found herself president of the IT product development department.

Marissa Mayer found herself in a difficult situation when she was offered the CEO position at Yahoo because she was pregnant. It is well known that this is not a prerequisite for career development. However, Marissa impressed the board of directors. The company’s management did not doubt for a moment that she was the one to lead Yahoo out of the crisis. After she left Yahoo in 2017, together with her colleague Munoz Torres, she founded Lumi Labs, which is a technology business incubator. The new company is based in Palo Alto, California, and its operations are focused on artificial intelligence and consumer media. She owes her career primarily to her character, which is an incredible “explosive mixture” of pedantry and workaholism.

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