Frances Elizabeth Holberton would have turned 107 today!
She was a mathematician and programmer most known for being part of the small team of women who programmed the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer.
However, she also used a deck of playing cards to develop the decision tree for the binary sort function!! I think I learned this via the BaseCS Podcast years ago, and if memory serves, she applied it to analyzing one of the U.S. censuses.
According to her wikipedia page, Betty was a night owl and they joked that she "solved more problems in her sleep than other people did awake"!
Here are a few other impressive things she did, during a time when women were considered "subprofessionals" to their male counterparts π:
- Participated in the development of the the C-10 Instruction set for BINAC
- Participated in the development of early standards for both COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages
- Helped develop the UNIVAC (another computer)
Happy birthday, Betty! Thank you for facing a mountain of challenges and paving the way π©π»βπ»
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