Fran Allen wins the Turing

February 21st, 2007 by comment SarahMei

The ACM has just announced that Fran Allen has won this year’s Turing Award. The Turing is computing’s Nobel Prize, and Allen is the first woman to win it. In the 1970s she did pioneering work in compiler optimization and parallel execution that made supercomputing possible. The availability of supercomputing, in turn, led to scientific breakthroughs in many other fields. Here’s a fluffier piece with a nice picture.

I don’t know why this made me so happy this morning. I usually roll my eyes when I see “The first woman to X! Omigod!!” news releases, but this one I forwarded to my mom and said “this is the award I’m going to win someday.” I never even thought about the Turing before, but now I feel strangely empowered.

I guess I better get working on that PhD. ;-)

This blog entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Events, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

2 Responses to “Fran Allen wins the Turing”

  1. Desi says:
    February 21st, 2007 at 8:18 pm

    Amen! It still amazes me that in the beginning it was so different and that things changed so quickly. I would love to meet this women and just talk to her. I am sure I could learn so much from her.

  2. Angel Dobbs-Sciortino says:
    February 22nd, 2007 at 4:26 pm

    That’s awesome. I was so glad when I read that article.

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