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3 women who radically changed the course of technology
- xorcist 10y agoHedy Lamarr, movie star and mathematician, should be worth a mention. The story about frequency hopping radios is an unlikely and fascinating read.
- robwalters 10y agoNone of my searches showed Hedy as a mathematician.In fact, though I agree the story of frequency hopping radio is fascinating, the invention required little or no mathematical knowledge. See my book at robsbookshop.com
- a_imho 10y agoIndeed. We had a story about her on a local news site. It was a bit disingenuous "The actress who invented the wifi", had to look up the patent to get a less biased picture though.
- deepnet 10y agoMargret Hamilton, who made programming an engineering discipline by inventing system modelling & software testing at NASA, which famously helped save Apollo 11.
- loklaan 10y agoI can't say I've read enough about Margaret, but she surely was a foundation to some of our modern software design principles. I didn't know about Apollo 11 details involving Hamilton! Cheers.
- chx 10y agoWhy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Helen_Worsley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Helen_Worsley is Beatrice Helen Worsley left out? While Ada Lovelace might have written the first algorithm Worsley helped to write the first actual program and wrote a PhD on basically bridging Turing machines and real machines.
- chinathrow 10y agoOn a list of three, there's allways n-3 left out...
- tomp 10y agoHm... Did Ada Lovelace actually change the course of technology? Or was she just a genious who was (unfortunately) way ahead of her time and thus unable to apply her talents in practice (somewhat like Leonardo da Vinci)?
- vanderZwan 10y agoFrom what I understand Babbage would not have achieved what he had without their collaboration; and I do not mean that in a sexist "supportive wife-surrogate to the world's most famous hater of organ grinders" kind of way, but as a full partner in developing cutting edge technology.
- mafribe 10y agoFrom what I understood, Babbage invented his computers himself. Lovelace was helpful to him because of her high-society connection. He was hoping to popularise his work and get more funding.
- vanderZwan 10y agoEven if it was the case that she was a "mere" patron who was into the science behind the machine itself and helped with popularising it, few people would downplay the importance of Steve Jobs for the course of computer history. So by that logic, either way we look at it she changed the course of technology.
- a_imho 10y agoAgree on the Lovelace part, but outside the Apple bubble many don't really place Steve Jobs that high in the pantheon of computing and I predict his cult status won't last as many of his contemporaries.
- deepnet 10y agoJobs got all his computing innovations from Xerox Parc & Woz. That he transformed society by successfully commercialising those ideas is undisputable. Alan Kay's Dynabook was an innovation, Jobs realised this innovation in the iPhone, transforming society as Kay predicted truly portable computers would. Again with windowing & GUIs, without Jobs Xerox Parc's ideas may have been lost to history. So he did radically change the course of technology which is the OPs title. Innovations languish without succesful implementation.
- minikites 10y agoRelated, Emmy Noether was extremely important to modern mathematics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether#Seminal_work_in_abstract_algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether#Seminal_work_in_a...
- deepnet 10y agoIndeed. Noether's formilisation of algebra allowed Church & Turing to develop the lambda-calculus & invent modern programming & computation. All modern physics stands apon Noether's 1st theorem, that every differentiable symettry of physical action is conserved. Not to mention rings.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mafribe 10y agoGrace Hopper didn't invent the compiler in the sense that we understand the term now (a semantics preserving translation from a source language to a target language). What her team did, was to produce a linker, the A-0_System. It is also wrong to say that Hopper is "largely the reason coders no longer need to write in ones and zeros". K. Zuse's Plankalkuel [2] is from the 1940s, and the first high-level programming languages. And formalisms like the lambda calculus or mu-recursive functions are even older, Turing complete and hardly based on 0s and 1s. It's also wrong to say without Lovelace we might not have computers, or indeed that she was the first programmer. Humans have been working on automata (that evolved into computers) by making them more powerful, e.g. the Antikythera mechanism [3]. It's also wrong to say that Lovelace was the first programmer. As far as one can see from the notes, she helped Babbage write down, and popularise his ideas. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
- tomlock 10y agoInterestingly, Plankalkuel was predated by Ada Lovelace's notes on calculating Bernoulli numbers. Then for Lovelace, lets go back even further. Mathematics itself already contains the base principles that enable the formalisms of lambda calculus. Additionally, the Antikythera mechanism was predated by many admittedly more crude but still important calculating mechanisms like the abacus. So its wrong to say that those automata would have existed independently. Its almost as if everyone's work is built upon the work of those before them and wouldn't be possible otherwise. Does that invalidate their achievement?
- x1798DE 10y ago> Its almost as if everyone's work is built upon the work of those before them and wouldn't be possible otherwise. Does that invalidate their achievement? I think that "x wouldn't have happened without y" statements in questions of scientific discovery are almost always false, at least partially for this reason. In some ways it does invalidate their achievement, to the extent that they are portrayed as being the sole agent of radical change when, in all likelihood, they are just the person who got there first (and often by a slim margin, as the history of scientific priority disputes shows).
- toni 10y agoHere is the piece[1] where Adele Goldberg explains how she warned Xerox executives about not giving away the kitchen sink to Steve Jobs (taken from Robert Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds" documentary) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw#t=453 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw#t=453
- leecarraher 10y agoTitle should be "computing technology". There are many types of technology (medical and x-rays for diagnosis comes to mind).
- Destreza 10y agoIt's great to know that Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer. Young programmers needs to learn a lot about her and her coding skills.
- MustardTiger 10y ago>When we think of innovators of the technology space we largely think of blokes like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk No, we most certainly do not. And of course one of the 3 spots is wasted on the myth of Lovelace, as usual. Don't bother picking someone who actually mattered.
- Lawtonfogle 10y agoIt depends on who 'we' is. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of computer does not. They probably give more than a fair share to Turing and von Neumann, but you are right they don't think of those 4. But if we are talking the general public, who might not know much about Turing beyond that a movie exists, if that. They would have no clue who von Neumann is. Zuckerberg, Gates, and Jobs would be far more likely to be who they think of as innovators of technology.
- forgetsusername 10y ago>like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk I wish the cult of personality would go away, and instead of credit going to an individual we could say, "innovators like Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Tesla/SpaceX".
- deepnet 10y agoI agree with opposing a cult of leaders getting credit, but replacing it with corporate credit ? There is a long unjust tradition of stealing deserved credit from engineers, employees & research assistants[1]. Sometimes individuals are solely resposible for important ideas and implementations, credit should be accorded accurately to teams and individuals. [1] Jocelyn Bell, discoverer of radio-pulsars, robbed of the Nobel by her research supervisor, stealing credit for it. Avoiding personalities should we merely say radio-pulsars were discovered at Jodrell Bank ? Seems less accurate, IMHO.
- finishingmove 10y agoI was hoping to read something in this article that could be used to inspire today's girls/women who are not programmers, but aspire to be (or have at least given it some thought). Unfortunately, it's hard to see things like "genius-level mathematician" and "studied maths religiously for her first thirty years" having anything other than an off-putting effect. The most common reaction to this would be, "I'm just not like that. Not everyone was born to be a programmer..."