Woman Crush Wednesday: Frances E. Allen

Frances E. Allen (Fran) was the first female winner of the Turing Award, aka the Nobel Prize for Computer Science. (PSA: she won in 2006 — — cue me crying for years because the award has been around since 1966). Her entire career was spent at IBM where she worked on compiler optimization and published so many amazing papers mostly on parallelizing/optimizing compilers. It is safe to say that her research and work has impacted the creation of programming languages and how those languages are used (She specifically worked with Cobalt and Fortran which are like the formothers of our hip cool languages). Fran grew up in upstate New York, got a degree in teaching, but went back to get her masters in mathematics. She was in so much debt that she started working at IBM to pay it off (she was hired to teach people Cobalt). She not only proved to be the dopest expert of compilers, but she kept up the spirit of teaching by mentoring others and helped guide countless women in their careers. She also mountain climbs. This woman — I can’t.

photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_E._Allen#/media/File:Allen_mg_2545-b.jpg