Motherboards
Often called the "first computer programmer," she realized that Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine could do more than just math—it could create music and art if given the right data.
Who is Ada Lovelace?
This entrepreneur and author founded Girls Who Code in 2012, an organization that has reached over 500,000 girls with the goal of closing the gender gap in technology.
Who is Reshma Saujani?
In 1903, while visiting New York City, this woman noticed a trolley driver struggling to see through sleet and subsequently patented the first mechanical version of this automotive safety device.
What are windshield wipers? (Mary Anderson)
While working on the ENIAC in 1947, Grace Hopper recorded the first actual case of this in her logbook—a moth that had caused a hardware failure.
What is a "bug"?
This West Virginia native and NASA mathematician was so trusted by John Glenn that he refused to fly the Friendship 7 mission until she "checked the numbers" of the electronic computer by hand to ensure his orbital trajectory was correct.
Who is Katherine Johnson?
This Navy Rear Admiral not only created the first compiler (which translated English to machine code) but also popularized the term "debugging" after finding a moth in a relay.
Who is Grace Hopper?
Before she was appointed the first female CTO of OpenAI, she led the teams behind the development of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the Tesla Model S.
Who is Mira Murati?
This DuPont chemist was looking for a strong but lightweight fiber for tires in 1965 when she accidentally discovered this material, which is now five times stronger than steel and used in bulletproof vests.
What is Kevlar? (Stephanie Kwolek)
This language, developed in the late 1950s by a team led by Grace Hopper, became the gold standard for business and banking software for decades.
What is COBOL?
In 1965, this nun became the first woman in the U.S. to earn a PhD in Computer Science; she also helped develop the BASIC programming language to make coding more accessible.
Who is Sister Mary Kenneth Keller?
A pioneer in computer vision, she co-founded the Human-Centered AI Institute at Stanford and created ImageNet, a massive database that essentially "taught" AI how to see.
Who is Fei-Fei Li?
A theoretical physicist and the first Black woman to earn a PhD from MIT, her research into subatomic particles at Bell Labs paved the way for the invention of the portable fax, touch-tone dialing, and solar cells.
Who is Shirley Ann Jackson?
Margaret Hamilton led the team that wrote the 145,000 lines of code for this 1960s NASA program; her "priority displays" saved the mission when the computer became overloaded during landing.
What is the Apollo Program (or Apollo 11)?
This group of six women, including Jean Bartik and Kathleen McNulty, were the original "computers" who physically programmed this 30-ton machine during WWII.
What is the ENIAC?
This engineer and social entrepreneur founded Black Girls Code in 2011 to provide African-American youth with the skills to enter the STEM fields, specifically focusing on digital divide issues.
Who is Kimberly Bryant?
Before we had GPS, this mathematician hand-calculated the satellite data that created the first mathematical model of the Earth's shape, known as a geoid.
Who is Gladys West?
In the 1970s, Adele Goldberg co-developed this programming language at Xerox PARC, which pioneered the Graphical User Interface (GUI)—icons, windows, and menus—later used by Apple and Microsoft.
What is Smalltalk?
Often called the "Mother of the Internet," she invented the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges and how data moves today.
Who is Radia Perlman?
As the Director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), this computer scientist was a co-author on the seminal paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots," which warned of the ethical risks of large language models.
Who is Timnit Gebru?
This British-American scientist's 1925 doctoral thesis proved that stars were composed mostly of hydrogen and helium—a "hard truth" that contradicted the leading scientific belief of the time that stars were made of the same elements as Earth.
Who is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin?
Created by Jean Sammet in 1962, this was the first widely used computer language for symbolic mathematics and formula manipulation, paving the way for modern tools like WolframAlpha.
What is FORMAC?