Frances Allen, Who Helped Hardware Understand Software, Dies at 88 - The New York Times

Frances Allen, Who Helped Hardware Understand Software, Dies at 88 - The New York Times

One-room schoolhouse to supercomputer

Computer scientist Frances Allen was born on a dairy farm with no electricity or running water, and eventually helped to build the foundations of modern programming. Allen was a pioneer in compiler optimization — improving the software that translates human-readable programming into ones and zeros — and parallel computing, which spreads tasks across more than one computer. She was the first woman to win computing’s top prize, the A.M. Turing Award. “She broke the glass ceiling,” said her colleague Mark Wegman. “At the time, no one even thought someone like her could achieve what she achieved.”

The New York Times | 6 min read