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From Big Blue
Frances "Fran" Allen, a pioneer in the world of computing, the first female IBM Fellow and the first woman to win the Turing Award, died on August 4, 2020, the day of her 88th birthday.
Fran grew up on a farm in Peru, New York. She graduated from The New York State College for Teachers (now SUNY – Albany) with a B.Sc. in mathematics in 1954 and began teaching school back at her local school in Peru. After two years, she enrolled at the University of Michigan and earned an M.Sc. degree in mathematics in 1957. In debt with student loans, Fran joined IBM Research in Poughkeepsie, NY as a programmer on July 15, 1957, where she taught incoming employees the basics of FORTRAN. She planned to stay only until her debts were paid, however, she ended up spending her entire career at IBM. Fran retired from IBM in 2002, but remained affiliated with the company as a Fellow Emerita.
As a pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms, Fran made seminal contributions to the world of computing. Her work on inter-procedural analysis and automatic parallelization continues to be on the leading edge of compiler research. She successfully reduced this science to practice through the transfer of this technology to products such as the STRETCH HARVEST Compiler, the COBOL Compiler, and the Parallel FORTRAN Product.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 06 2020, @12:47PM (3 children)
Good to remember scientists during this current backlash against science. I admit I have never even heard of Frances Allen. Has sexism in the sciences, of which computer science may be the worst, helped bury her and her contributions?
A big feature of the backlash is an increase in division and cutthroat competition. The Know-Nothing trolls would like to burn it all down. De-fund education, close schools, shut down labs. Private, corporate labs are not safe from the hatchet. When the trolls gain control, they make insincere, impossible, and idiotic demands of the lab, take apparent failure and refusal badly, and are only too pleased to turn out the lights when they have the excuses they sought. With that going on, the last thing scientists should do is let their own competitions get out of hand. It can only hand the trolls further justification for pulling the plug. Friendly competition is good, but discriminatory and unfair competition, such as sexism, is not.
There was, perhaps, already an oversupply of PhDs. However that may be, the current hostile climate has made things worse. I wonder how many scientists are sitting at home, largely idle, or are doing low skilled work, possibly even manual labor? The trolls love and hate that. They love seeing scientists forced to do janitorial work, while simultaneously hating the fellows for taking their jobs.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2020, @03:08PM (2 children)
> Has sexism in the sciences, of which computer science may be the worst, helped bury her and her contributions?
Or has anti-sexism in the sciences, of which computer science may be the worst, help elevate her shitty contributions out of the trashcan of history?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2020, @03:32PM (1 child)
Read what she did and how well she is known in the field before saying something this fucking STUPID
NSA, STRETCH, ACS, parallel computing.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2020, @04:58PM
And how many men did Ms. Allen stomp on, ruining their lives in the process? Nobody ever listens to the victims.