The Turing Award is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of computer science." In 2006, Frances Allen made history as the first woman to win the Turing Award for her work in compilers, code optimization, and parallelization. Ms. Allen originally recieved a BA in math from the New York State College for Teachers (now the State University of New York-Albany), and a masters degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1957. She first worked as a teacher in in upstate New York (where she is originally from) but ended up taking a job with IBM to pay off debt. She stayed for 45 years. During her career, she became the first woman IBM Fellow, and also created programming languages and security codes for the NSA. According to her Turing Award biography, her "abstractions, algorithms, and implementations... laid the groundwork for automatic program optimization technology." Her work also garnered an induction into the Women In Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame in 1997 and the Ada Lovelace Award in 2002.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
