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Wow, five days in and I am already made of fail! That just means you get two awesome women tonight!
If you are on a computer and you don't know who Ade Byron Lovelace is, then it's a good thing you're reading.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace:
Babbage asked the Countess of Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English, subsequently requesting that she augment the notes she had added to the translation. Lady Lovelace spent most of a year doing this. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in The Ladies' Diary and Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under the initialism "AAL".
In 1953, over one hundred years after her death, Lady Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now been recognised as an early model for a computer and Lady Lovelace's notes as a description of a computer and software.
Her notes were labeled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, the Countess describes an algorithm for the analytical engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and for this reason she is often cited in popular culture to be the first computer programmer.
While there are critics who doubt the significance of her work, I still think it's significant that a woman of her time contributed to the technology I am using today. Ada died of cancer in 1852, at the age of 37. Imagine what she might have done had she lived a little longer.
The next of the March women is a contemporary.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_A._C%C3%B3rdova:
France Anne Cordova is an American astrophysicist, researcher and university administrator. She is the eleventh President of Purdue University.
From http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/chh/bio/cordova_f.htm:
After graduation she went to work as a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. According to Woman: "As a young astronomer, Córdova pioneered a new approach to studying the stars. She helped mobilize hundreds of her colleagues around the world, amateurs and professionals alike, to simultaneously point their telescopes at the same fleeting events in space; the stars that pulse, flare, and explode." She was one of the first astrophysicists "to measure the X-Ray radiation emanating from white dwarfs, old stars with intense gravitational fields and pulsars, stars that flash rhythmically like fast-spinning lighthouses in space."
From 1980 through 1986, she also served as project leader for a project called Astrophysical Processes in Strong Gravitational Fields. Her primary duty was to direct a research group whose interests included pulsars, X-Ray binaries, cataclysmic variable stars and the dust shells of novae.
This is all cool! She's the oldest of twelve kids and she's come far in her career. What I found most interesting about Dr. Cordova is the fact that physics was her second career. She was an English major with anthropology fieldwork for her undergraduate work. She worked as a writer. And then she became a scientist! Best of both worlds!
If you are on a computer and you don't know who Ade Byron Lovelace is, then it's a good thing you're reading.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace:
Babbage asked the Countess of Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English, subsequently requesting that she augment the notes she had added to the translation. Lady Lovelace spent most of a year doing this. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in The Ladies' Diary and Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under the initialism "AAL".
In 1953, over one hundred years after her death, Lady Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now been recognised as an early model for a computer and Lady Lovelace's notes as a description of a computer and software.
Her notes were labeled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, the Countess describes an algorithm for the analytical engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and for this reason she is often cited in popular culture to be the first computer programmer.
While there are critics who doubt the significance of her work, I still think it's significant that a woman of her time contributed to the technology I am using today. Ada died of cancer in 1852, at the age of 37. Imagine what she might have done had she lived a little longer.
The next of the March women is a contemporary.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_A._C%C3%B3rdova:
France Anne Cordova is an American astrophysicist, researcher and university administrator. She is the eleventh President of Purdue University.
From http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/chh/bio/cordova_f.htm:
After graduation she went to work as a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. According to Woman: "As a young astronomer, Córdova pioneered a new approach to studying the stars. She helped mobilize hundreds of her colleagues around the world, amateurs and professionals alike, to simultaneously point their telescopes at the same fleeting events in space; the stars that pulse, flare, and explode." She was one of the first astrophysicists "to measure the X-Ray radiation emanating from white dwarfs, old stars with intense gravitational fields and pulsars, stars that flash rhythmically like fast-spinning lighthouses in space."
From 1980 through 1986, she also served as project leader for a project called Astrophysical Processes in Strong Gravitational Fields. Her primary duty was to direct a research group whose interests included pulsars, X-Ray binaries, cataclysmic variable stars and the dust shells of novae.
This is all cool! She's the oldest of twelve kids and she's come far in her career. What I found most interesting about Dr. Cordova is the fact that physics was her second career. She was an English major with anthropology fieldwork for her undergraduate work. She worked as a writer. And then she became a scientist! Best of both worlds!