Women in computing

Margaret Hamilton

MIT engineer who led the software for the Apollo Moon landings and coined “software engineering”

1936 – 2026

Jean E. Sammet

Programming-language pioneer who helped design COBOL

1928 – 2017

Grace Hopper

US Navy rear admiral who wrote the first compiler and helped create COBOL

1906 – 1992

Margo Seltzer

Computer scientist who co-created Berkeley DB

Lynn Conway

Computer architect who co-led the VLSI chip-design revolution and championed transgender rights

1938 – 2024

Karen Spärck Jones

British computer scientist who invented inverse document frequency, used in search engines

1935 – 2007

Sophie Wilson

Computer scientist who designed the ARM instruction set and BBC BASIC

Shafi Goldwasser

Cryptographer who co-invented zero-knowledge proofs

Born 1958

Radia Perlman

Network engineer who invented the spanning-tree protocol, the “mother of the internet”

Born 1951

Frances Allen

IBM compiler pioneer and the first woman to win the Turing Award

1932 – 2020

Barbara Liskov

MIT computer scientist known for data abstraction and the Liskov substitution principle

Born 1939

Adele Goldberg

Xerox PARC researcher who co-developed Smalltalk

Born 1945

Ada Lovelace

Mathematician often regarded as the first computer programmer

1815 – 1852