Introducing Our March Data-Birds
Well Data-Birds, March is about to leave us and so it is time to introduce the Data-Bird of the month!
With March being Women’s History month, we thought we would take a look at some of the women who blazed this trail before us. These will not be the regular deep data-bird dive, rather we will give you a brief summary of each and a list of resources to check out to learn more.
When I was in school, we didn’t learn about many of the contributions of these women, which made it difficult for many women to see themselves in the field. That is changing now as women’s past contributions are coming to light and they are getting some of the recognition they deserve. Some of these will be familiar to you, and others will be new, but I promise they won’t be boring!
Ada Lovelace
Born to the poet Lord Byron as Augusta Ada Byron and known as the countess of Lovelace, Ada Lovelace was a gifted mathemetician who has been credited as the first computer programmer. After being introduced to Charles Babbage by a mutual friend, Lovelace became interested in his ‘Analytical Machine.’ In 1843, she translated and annotated a work by an Italian mathematician (Luigi Federico Menabrea). These detailed annotations included a description of how the analytical engine could be programmed to compute Bernoulli numbers. Her paper was well-received at the time, but the British establishment showed little interest in her work. Lovelace died at the age of 36, it would be a century until her contributions were recognized.
For more information on Ada Lovelace:
Wikipedia
10 facts about Ada Lovelace
Ada’s Algorithm book (Amazon)
Children’s book about Ada Lovelace
Florence Nightingale
Most of us learned of Florence Nightingale in elementary school. We were taught that she revolutionized nursing through her environmental theory — that death rates of injured soldiers could be greatly improved through proper hygiene and nourishing meals. While it seems intuitive now, Nightingale found that injured soldiers died more often from preventabe illness than from their injuries. But, how did she KNOW this? Nightingale was a brilliant statistician and collected data on causes of illness and death. She was a pioneer in data vizualization, making it easier to communicate her findings.
For more information on Florence Nightingale:
Article from History of information
Data visualization and Florence Nightingale
Nightingale’s tables and illustrations
Biography of Florence Nightingale
NASA ‘computers’
When Macie Roberts rose through the ranks at NASA to become a supervisor, she made the decision to only staff her team with women. These human ‘computers’ charted America’s path to space by hand! These complex calculations could take a week and many notebooks to produce. When NASA first started to work with IBM computers, the male engineers and scientists didn’t trust the machine calculations, and dismissed the programming as ‘women’s work’. This gave women an opportunity to learn to code computers. It was a special group of women at Langley research center in Virginia that were the real African-American women behind ‘Hidden Figures’.
For more information on the NASA computers:
Dorothy Johnson biography
Mary Jackson biography
Katherine Johnson biography
7 books on the women of NASA
The women of ENIAC
The world’s first electronic digital computer — the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) was constructed in the 1940s. The design is credited to John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania, but it was a group of six women (Fran Bilas, Betty Jennings, Ruth Lichterman, Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, and Marlyn Wescof) who were tasked with programming the system. During WWII, ENIAC was used to calculate artillery firing tables. ENIAC was also used for some of the early research into the hydrogen bomb. At the time, computers had to be physically programmed by adjusting switches and cables. Debugging was a painstaking process that involved climbing inside ENIAC to find the faulty connection. The work to set up a single calculation could take days. At the time, the work to program a computer was thought of more as an operator than any sort of engineer or programmer. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the contribution of these women would be recognized.
For more information on the women of ENIAC:
Wired article on early women programmers
Kathy Kleinman’s story of discovering the ENIAC women
When coding was a women’s job
The untold story of the women who made the internet
There are so many more women who were early pioneers in computers and data, far too many to list here. While it is tragic that their accomplishments were not recognized in their time, it is important that we spread the word and encourage more women to enter STEM fields.
