| “Frances Allen, a former high school math teacher who became one of the leading computer scientists of her generation and, in 2006, was the first woman to win the A.M. Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize in computing, died in Schenectady, N.Y., on Aug. 4, her 88th birthday. . . .
Ms. Allen, after being introduced to the FORTRAN programming language when it was released in 1957, was fascinated with compiler optimization early in her career and became one of the leading visionaries in the field. Because of its compiler program, FORTRAN enabled a manner of communication with the computer that was closer to human understanding. With that as her model, Ms. Allen was inspired to make compilers more efficient. Her work, which set the tone for how people in the field think about compiler optimization, bridged the gap between how computers communicate and how people communicate, thus opening up the use of computers to scientists and engineers and others outside the glass-enclosed data center fortresses.” — Glenn Rifkin, Washington Post |
A related tale — Systems Programming in this journal.
Of greater interest to mathematicians —
The work of a man to whom Frances Allen was once married —
“Schwartz’s early work with his thesis advisor Nelson Dunford
led to the two of them collaborating on a famous book Linear Operators
which quickly became known simply as ‘Dunford and Schwartz’.”
— https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Schwartz_Jacob/.
Schwartz reportedly died on March 2, 2009. For related religious remarks,
see this journal on that date.