Somewhat beauty and poetry

It’s Ada Lovelace Day, the single day out of 365 that we devote to honoring women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In the past, I’ve written about the architect Julia Morgan, engineer Beatrice Shilling, physicist Joan Strothers Curran, Nobel Laureate for physiology Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, computer scientist Grace Hopper, radio frequency pioneer Hedy Lamarr and chemist Marie M. Daly. Among others.

This year, I’m shooting for the stars. In particular, astronomer Maria Mitchell, whose Quaker family believed girls had the same right to pursue their passions as boys.

One of seven children, Mitchell was born on Nantucket Island in 1818. She started her own school at age 17, where she accepted any child, regardless of race or gender.

On 1 October, 1847, she discovered Comet 1847 VI, which came to be known as Miss Mitchell’s Comet. There were other female astronomers around, both in the US and Europe, but her discovery raised the stock of New World astronomy among scientists in the Old World. It also brought her celebrity, which she used as a platform to enable other women to pursue their dreams.

Although she didn’t hold a degree, in 1865 Mitchell was the first professor appointed to the faculty of astronomy at Vassar College. Under her leadership and through her inspiration, Vassar enrolled more mathematicians and astronomers than Harvard from 1865 to 1888. Her students and she began photographing sunspots in 1873, the first photos of the sun. This allowed her to explore the hypothesis that sunspots were cavities on the sun’s surface, not clouds. (As it turns out, they aren’t. They’re regions of lower surface temperature caused by magnetic field flux.)

Despite the international reputation that Mitchell brought to Vassar, the college paid her and a female colleague lower salaries than younger male professors. Mitchell and Alida Avery persuaded the administration to give them parity.

One of the things she said that resonates with me is, "We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry."

Mitchell retired from Vassar in 1888, and died a year later. She left a legacy of scientific achievement, intellectual curiosity and moral strength that everyone can admire.

Designed to last

In addition to Peter Norman Day, 9 October is also Ada Lovelace Day, when we honor women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). In years past, I’ve written about such brilliant minds as Grace Hopper (whose celebration I attended just two weeks ago); Nobel Laureate (for physiology/medicine) Rosalyn Sussman; Hedy Lamarr (who developed the radio frequency hopping system that underpins mobile telephony); research chemist Marie M. Daly; IDEO designer Barbara Beskind; and Joan Struthers Curran and Beatrice Shilling, engineers whose work contributed to our victory in the Second World War.

This year I’m branching out on the engineering theme, and giving you the noted American architect of the 20^th Century, Julia Morgan. Born in San Francisco and raised in Oakland, Morgan was the first woman to be licensed as an architect in the State of California, following studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and l’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris (where she was the first female student).

After a stint with another architectural firm, Morgan opened her own practice, embracing the Arts and Crafts style. She ran her firm in the atelier style, and was exceptionally generous in teaching those who worked with her. She designed a number of structures for the women-only Mills College and several YMCA buildings (including the one in Pasadena, where I learned to swim).

Morgan is perhaps best known for a single client, being the architect for William Randolph Hearst’s mansion at San Simeon, on the Central California Coast; we know it as Hearst’s Castle. Morgan had to incorporate a whole range of styles and architectural pieces that Hearst had picked up in his travels. Frankly, I do not find it particularly inviting as a result, but there are certainly some spectacular elements, notably the truly spectacular Neptune Pool.

But she was exceptionally prolific. Here are some other buildings she designed:

The Berkeley City Club:

The Ladies Protection and Relief Society’s The Heritage nursing home (one of only a few pre-WWII buildings to survive the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989):

Fairmont Hotel:

Morgan got the job of redesigning the hotel, which was damaged in the 1906 earthquake. She was a pioneer in the deployment of earthquake-resistant materials, including reinforced concrete.

Chinatown YWCA:

Girton Hall (UC Berkeley):

The Sausalito Women's Club:

And those are just a few from around the Bay Area.

We don’t know much about Morgan’s personal life; architecture seems to have consumed everything for her. In the span of her career before her retirement in 1951, she designed hundreds of public and private structures, taking commissions from the ultra-wealthy to help subsidize her work for organizations serving women and minorities. Her legacy is somewhat localized, but truly impressive.

Nuclear power, and caller ID

Hurrah—it’s Ada Lovelace Day! You know—the one day of the year that we consider ourselves all diverse and inclusive to recall the contributions made to the fields of science, technology, engineering and math by women.

In years past, I’ve written about such brilliant minds as Grace Hopper (whose celebration I attended just last week); Nobel Laureate (for physiology/medicine) Rosalyn Sussman; Hedy Lamarr (who developed the radio frequency hopping system that underpins mobile telephony); research chemist Marie M. Daly; IDEO designer Barbara Beskind; and Joan Struthers Curran and Beatrice Shilling, engineers whose work contributed to our victory in the Second World War.

If you’ve ever used caller ID to screen phone calls (before the telemarketers and IRS scam artists learned to spoof their numbers), you can thank today’s entry. Shirley Ann Jackson, a DC native, was the first African-American to be granted a doctorate from MIT; it was in nuclear physics, and the year was 1973.

Jackson’s career spanned serious bench research at prestigious labs in the United States and Europe, including AT&T Bell Laboratories, where her discoveries contributed to advances in semiconductors, and to the development of touch-tone telephony, caller ID/call waiting, fiber optics and solar cells. President Bill Clinton appointed her the Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where she assisted in the establishment of the International Nuclear Regulators Association.

Since July of 1999, Jackson has served as president of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. I kind of wish she’d stayed at the bench and come up with a way to shut out all the telemarketers and scammers, but I suppose that’s too much to hope from even as remarkable a woman as Jackson.

Chemistry and couraging

It’s the second Tuesday in October, so it must be Ada Lovelace Day, when we honor women who’ve made major contributions to the advancement of society via one of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines.

In the past I’ve brought to your attention the mother of modern computers, Grace Hopper (whose Celebration is taking place in Houston this week); Nobel Laureate (in Physiology/Medicine) Rosalyn Sussman; Hedy Lamarr (if you’re reading this on a mobile device, you can thank her for developing the frequency hopping system on which mobile communications are based); and two engineers who contributed to the Allied victory in World War II: Joan Struthers Curran, whose work on little aluminum bits called “chaff” helped to foil Nazi radar and divert attention from the D-Day landings; and Beatrice Shilling, who solved the problem of British fighter planes cutting out mid-dogfight due to carburetors that weren’t designed to support the kinds of maneuvers necessary to take on the Luftwaffe.

Last year I wrote about a woman who went through two careers—one military and one in private practice—as an occupational therapist, during which she designed and patented various devices to help patients achieve and maintain balance. Eventually, after retiring twice, and in her 90s, Barbara Beskind got to achieve her longstanding dream of being an inventor when she joined Silicon Valley design giant IDEO.

Today, though, we’ll go back to academia and to bench research, and talk about Marie M. Daly, the first African American woman to be granted a Ph.D. in chemistry. If you are concerned about your cholesterol, happy about your cholesterol or know anything at all about your cholesterol, it’s largely because of the work that Daly did.

Born in Queens in 1921, Daly was encouraged to follow her interest in science by her family and her teachers at Hunter College High School (which was all-female, a fact that I cannot believe is insignificant). She pursued studies at Queens College, living at home to keep expenses down, and graduating magna cum laude in 1942 with a degree in chemistry.

She followed with a master’s in a year from New York University, while working part-time as a lab assistant at Queens College (who thought enough of her potential to fund her studies at NYU). Following a year tutoring chemistry students she enrolled in the doctoral program at Columbia University, working under another woman pioneer, Mary L. Caldwell, whose focus was on the digestive enzyme amylase. She was awarded her Ph.D in 1947.

Daly taught for two years at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., then received a grant from the American Cancer Society to support a postdoc at the Rockefeller institute in New York. There she worked on understanding the metabolism of components of the cell nucleus. Her career included teaching at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, and at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Daly was also an investigator for the American Heart Association, researching how hypertension affects the circulatory system. She was also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In addition to her research and teaching, Daly set up programs and scholarships to increase diversity in the ranks of chemists. Her real passion was expanding knowledge, whether it was as a bench researcher, a teacher or an encourager.

It’s hard to know what kinds of hurdles she faced as a black woman in science in academia. Bias against women and minorities is still rife at all levels of STEM (and elsewhere); rather ironically, this is well-documented in scientific study after scientific study. But she never wavered, not from her first discovery as a child of Paul De Kruff’s book, The Microbe Hunters. She knew at an early age what she wanted to do, and she did it.

All this is an extraordinary tale. But the thing that drew me to Daly’s story is this quote, which is applicable to everyone: “Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.”

Well, yes you do.

Age does not wither...

Whoa—it’s Ada Lovelace Day again? Already?

Well, so it is. Ada Lovelace Day being the time to consider women who’ve made stellar contributions to the advancement of society via one of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. In the past I’ve brought to your attention the mother of modern computers, Grace Hopper (whose Celebration is taking place in Houston this week); Nobel Laureate (in Physiology/Medicine) Rosalyn Sussman; Hedy Lamarr (if you’re reading this on a mobile device, you can thank her for developing the frequency hopping system on which mobile communications are based); and two engineers who contributed to the Allied victory in World War II: Joan Struthers Curran, whose work on little aluminum bits called “chaff” helped to foil Nazi radar and divert attention from the D-Day landings; and Beatrice Shilling, who solved the problem of British fighter planes cutting out mid-dogfight due to carburetors that weren’t designed to support the kinds of maneuvers necessary to take on the Luftwaffe.

I belong to a couple of groups sponsored by the Anita Borg Institute, which puts on the Grace Hopper Celebration, a conference devoted to women in STEM. You’ll recall that the GHC last year made headlines because Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella forgot that Twitter exists and gave a ballroom full of technically savvy women with mobile devices and Wi-Fi connections career advice centered on the notion that not asking for raises is some kind of XX-chromosome superpower.

(There was also the plenary panel of four executives of tech companies—all male—that consisted of the quartet talking amongst themselves and taking no questions from another room full of women with connectivity and social media accounts.)

GHC is about as good as it gets for women in STEM, so I hope the programs this week are more on point than last year’s. And one of the issues that I’ve seen emerging in discussions over the past few weeks is that of the invisibility of women of a certain age in tech. There were several threads in which a number of women over 35 who attended previous GHCs said that the recruiters—who attend en masse to try to attract female engineers to make their companies not look so much like frat houses—almost literally did not see them. They looked right past you if you appeared to be more than five years out of college.

And, they added, when they brought up this ridiculous situation to the ABI people, they were met with thunderous silence.

So my subject for Ada Lovelace Day 2015 is Barbara Beskind, whose dream had always been to be an inventor, but had to wait seven decades before she could fulfill it.

When Beskind was planning for college, engineering departments didn’t admit women, so she went into domestic engineering (AKA home economics) and went on to have two careers (one in the Army, then in private practice) as an occupational therapist. During those 60 years, she designed and patented various devices to help patients achieve and maintain balance.

Then a couple of years ago she watched a 60 Minutes segment with the CEO of IDEO, one of the true paradigm-shifting organizations of the Valley They Call Silicon. You may not recognize the name, but IDEO is the design consulting outfit that brought us the mouse. You know:

Among other things.

Beskind, who was ready to retire (for the second time) thought, “Hey, I’d like to work there,” so she reached out to them and they agreed that she had a lot to contribute. So for the past two years, she’s been working in just about the most innovative, bleeding-edge tech-designing field, bringing her deep understanding of the needs of aging people to the creation of a whole range of products.

Think about it—the vast preponderance of the devices and apps you find in both the enterprise and consumer markets are thought up and implemented by Millennials, people whose vision is sharp, for whom joint pain is theoretical and who have no notion of mortality. Designing for stiff fingers, failing eyes and slower movements is not in their native vocabulary. Beskind introduces those elements to them.

What I love about Beskind is that she’s living her dream of being in tech, without having come up through tech. She’s a non-engineer making extremely valuable contributions, and she is recognized by the innovation elite for those contributions. She’s a shining example for non-techies.

She’s also a role model for those of us who are not 20-somethings, who are the Brahmins of the Valley They Call Silicon. She’s kicking major design ass at age 90. We all can’t be Barbara Beskind, but if there are any true thought leaders around here, they should be taking on board the lesson that technology innovation benefits from diversity in background and age, as well as in other areas.

Fiber of life

My, my, time does roll around, doesn’t it? Seems like only yesterday I was writing about Beatrice Shilling, the woman who solved one of the more important engineering problems for the Royal Air Force during World War II. But, here we are at Ada Lovelace Day again, and I’m spoilt for choice in terms of subject matter.

But since I’m a military historian, I’ll stay with my area of expertise (a couple of years ago I introduced you to Joan Strothers Curran, who developed “window” or “chaff”, which was successfully used to confuse German radar reception in aid of D-Day). I’m honoring Stephanie L. Kwolek, the chemist whose curiosity led to the synthetic fiber we now know as Kevlar.

Kwolek, who died in June at age 90, actually took the job with the textile chemistry division of the DuPont Company as a temporary measure between undergraduate study and medical school. (As a child, she loved sewing and working with fabrics, but her mother convinced her that she wouldn’t make a good fashion designer because she was such a perfectionist; so she gave that up for medicine.) But she found the research she was doing into polymers so interesting that she decided she was where she should be and dug in.

It was in the mid-1960s, while she was looking into the creation of fibers capable of performing in extreme conditions, that she came across something that didn’t emerge from the process as expected—instead of a clear, syrupy liquid, it was thin and opaque. Ordinarily this sort of disappointing output would have been thrown away (which is what her colleagues wanted to do), but Kwolek was curious. She persuaded one of them to run it through a spinning process to remove liquid solvent and reveal fibers.

What came out of the spinneret was an exceptionally stiff fiber that tested five times as strong as steel of equal weight. It was also fire resistant. The DuPont crowd latched onto its potential right away—Kevlar has been used by law enforcement officers and combat troops since the mid-70s. It’s integral to body armor and helmets that deflect handgun and rifle fire, as well as shrapnel (which is ugly, ugly stuff).

Additionally, the fiber is used in tires, sporting equipment, cables and cellular phones.

Here’s what I really like about Kwolek: she was curious. She saw possibilities where her colleagues saw useless goop. She was willing to push for further information, again and again. She saw connections and tested everything. She was a successful and respected professional in an industry that typically expects those qualities to come in a package containing the Y chromosome and advanced degrees. And she shared her experience, her expertise and her enthusiasm, inspiring generations of potential scientists.

A paper she co-wrote for the Journal of Chemical Education in 1959, “The Nylon Rope Trick”, describes how to demonstrate condensation polymerization in a beaker at atmospheric pressure and room temperature. Yeah, beyond me, too, but it’s commonly demonstrated in classrooms around the country.

It’s possible that someone would have come up with a Kevlar-like fiber eventually, but Stephanie L. Kwolek got there first, doing what she loved. Saving thousands of lives, doing what you love; it don’t get any better than that.

Mother of all Spitfires. & Hurricanes

It’s the fifth annual Ada Lovelace Day—the international celebration of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and science). Lovelace was the Englishwoman who pioneered the precursor of computer programming in the first half of the 19^th Century.

In past years, I’ve written about Grace Hopper (computer programming), Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (physiology), Joan Strothers Curran (physics) and Hedy Lamarr (radio frequency). Today I give you Beatrice Shilling.

Who, you ask? Beatrice Shilling, the aeronautical engineer who solved the problem of engine cut-out in the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines that powered the Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes that were the backbone of British defense during the Battle of Britain. Her simple addition to the SU carburetor—a flow-restrictor (a disc with a small hole in it)—was the fix that enabled RAF pilots to perform the extreme maneuvers needed to outfly the Luftwaffe.

It was known informally as “Miss Shilling’s Orifice”. Gotta love those RAF wags; really.

Shilling was a butcher’s daughter who lucked out in an early (female) employer for whom she was installing wiring and generators. The employer encouraged her to study electrical engineering; then she took an advanced degree in mechanical engineering and worked as a research assistant.

She also raced motorcycles successfully. Meaning she beat professional riders.

Following the war, Shilling continued studying the problems of aeronautics. She dismissed the notion that she could be inferior to any man just by virtue of having the XX chromosome configuration.

She refused to marry her husband, George Naylor, until he’d matched her record of lapping the Brooklands circuit on a motorcycle at more than 100 MPH.

Shilling was limited in her career by her social skills, but not by her intellect, her curiosity or her ability to develop practical solutions to critical technology problems. She deserves to be remembered for her contributions.

The Ecstasy of Ada Lovelace Day

Here it is again—Ada Lovelace Day, a global celebration of women in science and technology, past and present. (A nice change from the subject of women being in the literal and figurative crosshairs for displaying any reasoning skills beyond those required to work out a recipe for stew or darning a sock.)

Lovelace (1815-1852) was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, and had a flair for mathematics that led her to a key partnership with Charles Babbage’s proto-computer. She might be considered the Mother of Machine Languages and is certainly well qualified to provide a hook for a day of recognition of the achievements of other scientifically-minded women.

In past ALD posts, I’ve discussed Admiral Grace Hopper, the mother of modern computing languages (including inventing the term “debugging” for the process of fixing logic errors); Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine for her work in developing radioimumunoassay (RIA);and Joan Strothers Curran, a physicist who invented the radar-deflecting countermeasure known as “window” or “chaff”, which played a key role in confusing the Germans about the intended D-Day invasion location.

All these women devoted their lives as well as their careers to technology advancement and scientific inquiry. My subject today…well, not so much.

But still.

Were it not for Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler Mandl Markey Loder Stauffer Lee Boies, you might not be hauling out your Verizon smartphone to Google who the hell this person is. She and her inventing partner, composer George Antheil, were granted the patent for frequency-hopping “secret communication system” on which many wireless communications systems are based.

Ah, forget the Google search: I’m talking about Hedy Lamarr. (And it’s interesting to me that in writing this, apparently Microsoft Word spellcheck doesn’t recognize either name. Seriously? WTH?)

Lamarr is better known as a movie star—from back in the days when a star was a studio product—than an inventor. She started out in her native Austria, was “discovered” by Louis B. Mayer and brought to Hollywood in the 1930s. She took to the glamorous life and bought into MGM’s publicity about her very early on. As far as I can tell, after reading a couple of bios about her, she couldn’t get enough money or adulation.

But she also had a bright mind, and she apparently picked up a lot of bits and bobs from the conversation at social events hosted by her first husband, arms manufacturer Friedrich Mandl. Guests at that table included high-ranking Nazis and table talk often turned to business of what’s nowadays referred to as C3—command, control and communications.

In 1940, Lamarr was kicking things around with a Beverley Hills neighbor, Anteil—an avant garde composer known for mechanistic pieces that involved (among other things) coordinating multiple player pianos. Lamarr was primarily interested in the possibilities that glands might hold for enlarging her breasts, but somehow the conversation turned to radio-controlled torpedoes—as, of course, it would.

Lamarr had an idea for what she called “frequency hopping”—moving the control commands around the broadcast spectrum in such a way that the enemy couldn’t jam the signal. Antheil proposed that the rapid frequency changes could be managed the same way he’d coordinated his player pianos in his “Ballet Méchanique”.

The patent for this protocol was granted in 1942, but wasn’t applied to weapons during WWII. In 1957 those crazy guys at Sylvania Electronic Systems translated the player piano rolls as programming media to electronics as a basis for secure communications. The technology was used by US vessels during the 1962 Cuban blockade; but by that time the patent had expired.

However, the story didn’t end there. The Lamarr-Antheil concept is the basis for modern spread-spectrum communications technology, enabling signals to mostly bounce around the spectrum and allowing us to enjoy incredibly banal conversations shouted into mobile phones and dodge texters staring into their hands on sidewalks of pretty much every country on the planet.

Lamarr didn’t earn anything from the patent, which probably really ate her lunch. (She had an unquenchable greed and kept a lot of lawyers busy, though not necessarily in the chips. She filed lawsuits the way most people file paystubs, but did not like paying for legal or any other services. Her six husbands in particular discovered that she was high maintenance in every sense of the term.)

As a human being, I wouldn’t rate her particularly well. And as a technologist, she was a dilettante. But, for one brief moment, she crystalized overheard conversations, found just the person who could deliver a practical application, and gave us communications capability that has forever changed the way we connect with one another.

Mother of chaff

It’s Ada Lovelace Day again; time to honor a woman in science who inspires admiration & achievement. Lovelace, you’ll recall, was a progenitor of computer programming—way long before Steve Wozniak & Bill Gates.

In past years I’ve written about computer science pioneer Grace Hopper and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, a Nobel Laureate in physiology and medicine.

This time round I present to you Joan Strothers Curran, a Welsh optician’s daughter whose sheer brilliance opened academic doors that would have otherwise been locked and barred to a young woman in 1930s Britain. As it is, although she won an open scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, the University didn’t award degrees to the women who had earned them.

Curran, a scientist and physicist, didn’t get a degree until 1987, when Strathclyde University gave her an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

From Newnham Curran went to the Cavendish Laboratory, a hotbed of physics research, where she met Sam Curran, a fellow researcher, who would become her husband of more than 50 years.

But World War II came along and Curran and her fellow researchers turned their minds to supporting the war effort. While her husband focused on radar, Curran joined the Counter Measures Group. She is credited with developing “window”, also known as “chaff”, for the Allies. Window consists of bits of reflective material that is dropped into the air to confuse radar.

Specifically, Curran’s window was deployed in the Pas de Calais during the early hours of D-Day to support the idea that the Allied landing would take place there instead of in Normandy. This contributed greatly to the success of D-Day.

At the time of the landings, the Currans were at the University of California at Berkeley, working on the Manhattan Project. Following the war, the family settled in Glasgow, Scotland, and Curran devoted much of her time to advocacy for the physically and mentally disabled.

I first heard of Curran when I read Anthony Cave-Brown’s Bodyguard of Lies, about the multi-layer deceptions surrounding D-Day. A single-line mention of her contribution in all those 900+ pages of text was enough to spark my interest. There does not seem to be anything by way of a biography of her, which is a loss. Joan Strothers Curran’s brilliant scientific mind helped shorten the worst war the world has known (so far), and turned it to improving the quality of all people’s lives. I want to know more.

Ada Lovelace 2010

For my contribution to this year’s Ada Lovelace Day, I’m thinking about Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine for the development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a methodology for measuring miniscule elements in human bodies so they can be traced.

RIA has been used to screen blood for the hepatitis virus in blood banks, to determine effective dosage levels of drugs, to detect foreign substances in the blood, and other medical applications.

What’s interesting to me about Yalow, aside from that whole nanotechnology breakthrough, is that she got her shoe in the physics door during World War II, when graduate schools gave financial aid to, gasp, women rather than have to close down research facilities for lack of men away at the war. Had it not been for that little contretemps, Yalow might have continued on as a secretary to one professor or another.

I first came across her when she hosted a PBS series on the life of Marie Curie in 1978, the year after she received the Nobel Prize. Kudos to PBS for raising that awareness, because current media like the Discovery Channel or TLC wouldn’t touch it, Yalow not meeting their standards of on-camera talent (either babelicious or tattooed to the gills).

So we've made progress on some fronts, and steps back in others.

Powder puff programming

Today being Ada Lovelace Day, I pledged to write about a woman in technology who inspires admiration. I immediately seized on Admiral Grace Hopper as the ideal subject, particularly as Ada Lovelace, only legitimate child of Lord Byron, is often described as the “first programmer” of computational devices, since she developed programs for Charles Babbage’s early mechanical computers.

Hopper is indeed the spiritual heir to Lovelace—a woman who was able to apply focus and drive to a variety of problems. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College with a degree in mathematics and physics in 1928—an era when this was considerably rarer than it is now. Her graduate work was at Yale and she was teaching math at Vassar when the US entered World War II.

She volunteered for the Navy Reserve in 1943 and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at the Harvard Computation Lab. Here she began her career in computing, working with Howard H. Aiken on the Mark I computer. She wanted to transfer to the regular Navy at the end of the war, but was refused because she was 38, so she remained at Harvard &and in the reserves.

In 1949 Hopper joined the company eventually to be known as Remington Rand and was key to the development of the UNIVAC I. She focused on compiler work; COBOL being the eventual output. She believed that computer programs could be written in a language more like English than the machine languages then being used—imagine what a huge leap forward that was.

She went on to pioneer the implementation of standards for testing systems and components. In the 1980s her tests were assumed by what’s now the National institute of Standards & Technology (NIST).

Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve as a Commander in 1966, but was recalled to active duty—this process occurred twice. She finally retired permanently (and involuntarily) in 1986, with a ceremony held in Boston on the USS Constitution. At that time she was the oldest officer in the USN.

DEC then hired her as senior consultant, a position she held until her death in 1992. Her focus there was lecturing on the early days of computers and methods computer hardware and software companies could use to make life easier on users.

You can pretty well bet that—whatever your frustrations with your PC, your mobile phone, or any piece of equipment that has computer components—it works a lot better that it would have had Grace Hopper not been the computing pioneer she was, and for so many decades.

Working on a Mark II computer at Harvard, a moth stuck in a relay was interfering with operation. Hopper referred to its removal as “debugging”, a term that is vital to any software development project. That moth is in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, if you care to check it out.

Also, if you’ve ever followed the aphorism that it’s better to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission, that’s been attributed to Hopper.

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is an annual conference focused on the research and career interests of women in the field. This year’s will be held in Tucson in September. I’ve put it on my calendar because—although not a programmer or analyst—I think my career has been shaped by Hopper’s philosophy, so it’s worthwhile.

I think my favorite quote from her is, “I believe in having an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”

You go, girl!