My late Ada Lovelace blog entry
Today was Ada Lovelace Day. I should've blogged my entry early today but never late than never? Anyway...
So for my entry I'm going to link to a few Vassar women who achieved big things in technology or science:
So for my entry I'm going to link to a few Vassar women who achieved big things in technology or science:
- Maria Mitchell - Influential 19th century astronomer and the first person, male or female, appointed to the faculty of Vassar in 1865.
- Ellen Swallow Richards '1870 - The first woman admitted to MIT (and their first female instructor), she was "the foremost female industrial and environmental chemist in the United States in the 1800s".
- Grace Hopper '28 - Important computer scientist who is credited for coining the term "bug", and whose concepts led directly to the creation of COBOL and other machine-independent programming languages. She was so important to the US military that a navy destroyer has been named after her. She was also a professor at the college for many years.
- Winifred Asprey '38 - Protege of Grace Hopper and founder of the Computer Science department at Vassar. I came of age in the lab which still bears her name at the college. (I met her and she was a fascinating woman.)
- Vera Rubin '48 - Influential astronomer and pioneer in theories of galactic velocities and dark matter.
- Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic '59 - "Goldman-Rakic's discoveries on short-term memory have implications for the treatment of diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and schizophrenia. Her pioneering studies detail the intricate circuitry within the pre-frontal cortex of the human brain." (from this article)
- Catarina Fake '91 - Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Flickr. We were in the same graduating class. (Note: I was partial to Flickr before I knew that, actually.)