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.
From Grace Hopper to Ada Lovelace: women who revolutionized computer science
Today’s Google Doodle honors computer science whiz Grace Hopper, who led the team that invented Common Business-Oriented Language, or COBOL, the first programming language that used words instead of numbers.
