for today
It is Ada Lovelace day and people have been blogging about women’s achievement in science & tech. I’m a little too drained from a streak of 15-hour work days (plus yoga) to actually write about much, but considering that it is a day of honoring my kind of stuff, here was my lazy tribute:
As a CS major, the first thing I was taught was the history of personal computer. And the first thing that stuck in my head, without me having to re-read or look up later, was the fact that the world’s first programmer was a woman. Ada Lovelace wrote algorithms intended for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine some time in the 1800s. Then later, when I was learning about compiling programs and how to ‘debug’ a program, I learned that the first person to develop a compiler was also a woman. Grace Hopper created a legacy when she pulled a real life bug out of a computer’s circuit to fix a problem, thereby coining the term ‘debug’.
Sometimes I think it’s a little sad and lop-sided that the technology field is filled with men, but it’s so perfectly natural that it was led by women.
think it’s quite interesting that most women in sciences were pushed down so long, that the only ones that are still know were insanely good.
hansi on 25 March 2010my current favourite is sofia kovaleyskaya….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Kovalevskaya