The world of information technology is filled with many amazing developers, inventors, researchers and prominent figures. And most of them are men. But even among women there were many talented scientists who made their invaluable contribution to the IT industry. In the post will talk about the fair sex, who have achieved success in the exact sciences. Namely: Karen Jones, Erna Hoover, Judy Malloy, Radia Perlman, Evelyn Boyd Granville, Hedy Lamarr and Sophie Wilson. Equally with others, these women influenced the history of the development of information technology.
Karen Spark Jones

Karen Spark Jones is a British computer scientist. She developed technologies that allowed users to work with a computer using ordinary words, and not through equations and code. This breakthrough was of great importance for the further development of search engines.
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Karen was born on August 26, 1935 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire (England). Father, Owen Jones, was a chemistry teacher. Mother, Norwegian Ida Spark, moved to the UK after World War II.
Spark Jones attended Huddersfield High School and then enrolled at Girton College in Cambridge. From 1953 to 1956 she studied history and philosophy. After graduating from university, Johns worked for a while as a teacher at a school, after which she fell into the field of computer science.
Karen Spark Jones:
My slogan: "computer science is too important to leave it only for men." I think that women bring diversity to the development process and open up new perspectives. They are more thoughtful and do not seek to correct technical errors on a pattern. I believe that computer science is an extremely interesting science. You are trying to create something that does not exist yet.
Spark Jones has worked in the language research department of the University of Cambridge since the late 1950s. Her work focused on using a thesaurus for speech and information processing. Certain words with their synonyms were translated into punched cards, and then more sophisticated ways of distinguishing multi-valued terms were developed. One example of a farmer working a field showed that the word field can have many meanings. But if you add as a target value a common basic concept that will apply to all words (for example, “agriculture”, includes both “farmer” and “process” and “field”), the program will select the word “land”.

Spark Jones wrote a thesis on “Synonymy and Semantic Classification” in 1964. This work was well ahead of its time and was published only twenty years later in an article on artificial intelligence in the University of Edinburgh. In fact, it was the first use of statistical clustering methods for lexical data.
In 1974, Spark Jones moved to the computer lab of the University of Cambridge. And until 2002 she was a professor of computer science. In the last years of her life she was engaged in the integration of these areas in the main flowcharts of artificial intelligence. One of her most important contributions was the concept of accounting for the weight of words inverse of the document frequency (IDF: inverse document frequency), which she presented in an article in 1972. Today, IDF is used in many search engines, usually as part of a TF-IDF scheme.
Spark Jones was a member of the British Academy (Vice President 2000-2002), AAAI (Association for the Development of Artificial Intelligence), ECCAI (European Association for Artificial Intelligence), was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994.
Karen Spark Jones died on April 4, 2007 in the city of Willingham, Cambridgeshire.
Erna Schneider Hoover

Erna Schneider Hoover - American mathematician, inventor of the computer method of switching calls.
Erna Hoover was born on June 19, 1926 in Igvington (New Jersey, USA). The family lived in South Orange, the father was a dentist, and the mother - a teacher. Erna has been interested in science since childhood. At a young age, she read the biography of Maria Skłodowska-Curie and, using this outstanding woman as an example, she realized that with a strong desire she could achieve success in science. Even despite the prevailing opinion of the time about the role of women.
Hoover attended Wellesley College, where she studied classical and medieval philosophy as well as history. In 1948 she graduated with honors and received a bachelor's degree. And in 1951, Erna received her Ph.D. from Yale University (Yale University) in the field of philosophy and the foundations of mathematics.
Hoover was a professor at Swarthmore College (Swarthmore College) from 1951 to 1954, she taught philosophy and logic. During the work she married Charles Wilson Hoover (Charles Wilson Hoover), who later greatly supported his wife's career aspirations.
In 1954, Hoover was invited to work at the Bell Labs lab. The internal study program was equivalent to a master’s degree in computer science. Switching systems went from electronic to computer-based. But when in a short period of time the number of calls reached a peak and the call centers were literally “overwhelmed” with calls, the whole system was hanging.
Hoover used her knowledge of symbolic logic and feedback theory to program call center control devices to use incoming call data to restore order throughout the system. She used a computerized electronic method to monitor the frequency of incoming calls at different times. With its help, it was possible to set priorities: according to the method, preference was given to the processes that concerned the input and output of the switch. Processes like accounting and billing were performed secondarily. As a result, the computer automatically adjusted the speed of receiving calls to the call center, significantly reducing the likelihood of overload.

Erna Schneider Hoover:
In my opinion - it was a sensible decision. I have developed an executive program to resolve situations in which the number of calls exceeds the norm. With the help of the method it was possible to optimize the process and save the system from failure.
For his invention, called the Feedback Control Monitor for the Stored Program Data Processing System (Monitoring of the feedback control for the process data system of the recorded program), Hoover issued a
patent no. 3,623,007 in November 1971. It was one of the first software patents ever issued.
Thanks to the invention, Hoover became the first female head of the technical department of Bell Labs. She headed the operations support department in 1987. The principles of her invention are still used in telecommunications equipment. In the future, Hoover worked on various high-level tasks. She has been researching the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile System radar program - a missile defense system to intercept intercontinental ballistic missile warheads. Her department worked on methods used in the creation of artificial intelligence, as well as on the development of large databases and software.
Hoover worked at Bell Labs for 32 years, until her retirement in 1987. She also served on the councils of higher education institutions in New Jersey. This amazing woman scientist was introduced to the national hall of fame of inventors in 2008.
Judy Malloy

Judith Ann Powers, known as Judy Malloy, a writer and self-taught programmer, invented her own database system for her novels.
Judy was born on January 9, 1942 in Boston. She spent her childhood in Massachusetts. Judy's mother was a journalist and newspaper editor, and her father worked as an assistant district attorney in two districts of Massachusetts, then was the chief assistant attorney of the state. Malloy since childhood, felt the vocation to the visual arts and began to engage in painting and drawings.
After graduating from Middlebury College with a degree in literature, Malloy got a job at the Library of Congress. After that, she moved to the position of technical information specialist at Ball Brothers Research Corporation, a NASA contractor. Malloy ran their technical library and studied the FORTRAN programming language to determine relevant content for research.
In the early 70s, Malloy moved to East Bay. There she developed a series of art books with inconsistent tales, powered by words and pictures.
In 1986, Judy wrote and programmed the innovative hypertext story
"Uncle Roger" ("Uncle Roger") - the first online project of hyper-literature with links that changed the plot depending on the choice of the reader.
Judy Malloy:
This was my first experience in database programming. The idea I’ve been working on since 1976 was to use molecular units to create an inconsistent story.
"Uncle Roger" contained three parts of a hypertext "narrabase" (narrative database), using search by keyword.
Radia Joy Perlman

Radia Joy Perlman - software engineer, network engineer. She invented the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which became fundamental to the operation of network bridges.
Radia was born on January 1, 1951 in Portsmouth (Virginia, USA). Parents worked on the American government: his father worked as an engineer on radar, and his mother - a programmer.
From the interview for The Atlantic:
At school I always liked puzzles, math lessons and exact sciences. These disciplines seemed so light and exciting. However, I did not meet the stereotype "engineer". I never disassembled things for parts or put the computer out of spare parts. In addition, I was always interested in art - I loved classical music, played the piano and horn, wrote essays and poems. She learned how to program only as a sophomore, during a visit to the physics class.
As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Perlman took part in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, as part of the LOGO Lab in the MIT artificial intelligence laboratory. She developed a children's version of the LOGO educational robotic language, called TORTIS. During the study, conducted in 1974-1976, young children (the youngest age was 3.5 years), programmed a training robot, called Turtle (Turtle). Radium was considered a pioneer in the field of teaching young children computer programming.
Perlman received a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree in MIT, and a doctorate in computer science (1988). Her doctoral thesis addressed the issue of routing in the presence of malicious damage to the network.
Most of all Perlman is known for her invention of the channel protocol STP. Its main task is to eliminate loops in the topology of an arbitrary Ethernet network including one or more network bridges. STP automatically blocks connections that are currently redundant for the full connectivity of switches.
Among other network contributions was the invention of concepts that created a certain type of routing protocol called “link state routing”. The protocol it created for DECnet was approved by the International Organization for Standardization and renamed IS-IS, and is the preferred routing protocol for most modern Internet service providers.

Perlman also worked on the standardization of TRILL (“Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links”), which allows for sending Internet packets using IS-IS instead of a spanning tree. She has done important work in the field of security.
In his free time from inventions and poetry, Perlman writes books. At first glance it may seem that this is a very "dry" literature. Especially judging by the names: "Interconnection: bridges, routers, switches and data transfer protocols" and "Network security: personal communication in the public world." But the author assures that these are not purely technical books and in fact they have their own humor. Perlman is the author of one network connection tutorial and co-author of one network security tutorial. She has more than 100 patents granted.
Perelman is often credited with the title "Mother of the Internet." But this is what she says about this:
I did not invent the Internet. And this is a title that cannot be obtained in the same way as, for example, the degree of doctor. I do not think that the emergence of the World Wide Web is the merit of any one person. Many people took part in its creation.
Evelyn Boyd Granville

Evelyn Boyd Granville (Evelyn Boyd Granville) - one of the first African American women who received a doctorate in mathematics.
Evelyn Boyd was born on May 1, 1924 in Washington. Her father worked as a laborer and left his mother when Boyd was very young. Boyd brought up his mother and aunt, who worked in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. With the financial support of her aunt, and later a small scholarship from Phi Delta Kappa, in 1941, she entered Smith College (Smith College). Her specialty was mathematics and physics. But Evelyn was also interested in astronomy. The student support organization for Smith College (Smith Student Aid Society of Smith College) provided Evelyn with a scholarship through which she enrolled at Yale. There she studied functional analysis under the direction of Einar Hill until 1949.
In 1950, she became a teacher at Fisk University. But two years later, she left the scientific community and returned to Washington to the Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories. She worked there for four years, after which she moved to IBM as a computer programmer.
“I always smile when I hear that women can't succeed in math”Boyd married Reverend Gamaliel Mansfield Collins (Reverend Gamaliel Mansfield Collins) in 1960 (divorced in 1967) and moved with him to Los Angeles, where she worked for the US Space Technology Laboratories. In 1962 she got into the space organization North American Aviation Space and Information Systems Division. There she worked on various Apollo projects, including doing trajectory calculations and developing “digital computer methods.”
Due to IBM's design, Boyd was forced to change jobs. In 1967, she became a professor of mathematics at the University of California (California State University). From 1984 to 1988, she taught at the University of Texas (Texas College), where she created programs of mathematical enrichment for elementary school.
Hedi lamarr

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesle (Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesle), known as Hedy Lamarr - Austrian, and later American film actress and inventor.
Hedy Lamarr was born on November 9, 1914 in Vienna (Austria). Her father was a banker (from Lemberg), and her mother was a pianist (from Budapest). At the age of 16, Hedy left home to go to drama school and act in films. Debut, became the role in the German film "Girl in a nightclub" (1930). During her career in Hollywood, the actress has played in more than 55 films. And no one could have imagined that at the peak of her film career, a girl would suddenly be engaged in inventions, having no scientific or technical education.
The first impetus for this was the message of the sunk evacuation ship on August 17, 1940. As a result, 77 children died. Then Lamarr decided to make his contribution to the development of military equipment and designed a system of interference-free radio control for torpedoes. And all this based on playing the four hands piano.
Hedy suggested sending a part of the signal at one frequency, and then moving on to another to transmit the next part of the signal. When matching the transmitter and receiver in terms of frequency hopping, something like a four-hand game would result, and the signal could become robust to jamming. Lamarr also suggested that the mechanical matching of the transmitter with the receiver could occur through a piece similar to a roller of a mechanical piano. A roller with pins and a chronometer drive looked compact enough to fit in the hull of a naval torpedo. In addition, according to Hedy, the system could use a set of 88 radio frequencies - according to the number of piano keys.
From the conversations of the co-authors of the invention, a special information transmission system was born, called the pseudo-random frequency tuning (Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum). This technology was presented by the US Navy. But it was possible to realize it only in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis.
The patent has become the basis for modern extended-spectrum communication technologies such as CDMA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology. The most famous example of the application of the invention Hedy Lamarr to date is the standard GSM radio telephone communication.

The last years of her life the former star spent, engaging in endless litigation in connection with the unauthorized use of his name. So, in 1998, the portrait of the actress became the symbol of Corel Draw's vector graphics program, after which Hedy filed a claim against Corel. However, the court recognized for the company the right to use the image of Lamarr.
Sophie wilson

Sophie Wilson - British inventor, developer of one of the very first commercially successful personal computers, creator of the ARM processor.
Wilson was born in 1957 in Leeds (Yorkshire, England). She studied computer science at the University of Cambridge (University of Cambridge). Inspired by the early MK14, I developed a microcomputer with a 6502 processor (an 8-bit processor with a 16-bit address bus allowing an address of up to 64 kilobytes of RAM).
In 1978, Wilson joined Acorn Computers Ltd, where she developed various computer devices. The model she created was used by Chris Curry (Chris Curry) and Hermann Hauser in the development of Acorn Micro-Computer.
In the early 80s, Wilson expanded the BASIC programming language on Acorn Atom's home computer to an improved version for Acorn Proton. This microcomputer contributed to the conclusion of a contract between Acorn and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In less than a week, Wilson developed a developed system, including a board and components and software. Proton became BBC Micro and its BASIC became BBC BASIC. Sophie wrote the manual and technical specifications, understanding that communication was an important part of success.
In 1983, Wilson began creating instructions for the first RISC processors (Reduced instruction set computing), Acorn RISC Machine (ARM). Distinctive features were: a much smaller number of transistors than in Intel microprocessors of that time, and the absence of microcode — the level at which the computer codes were converted into simpler micro-instructions. Due to this simplified architecture, ARM microprocessors not only had higher performance, but also consumed much less power than competitive ones.

Wilson developed Acorn Replay, a video architect for Acorn machines — an extension of the operating system for video access, optimized for high frame rates on ARM central processors from ARM 2 and beyond.
She was a board member of the technology and gaming company Eidos plc, and was also a consultant for ARM Ltd (after its separation from Acorn in 1990). In 1999, after the collapse of Acorn Computers, Sophie Wilson founded the company Element 14 in which she developed the FirePath processor. Today it is used in the equipment of broadband networks and set-top boxes. In 2001, Element 14 was sold to Broadcom for $ 450 million.