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Monday, November 17, 2014

What's with women in tech.


Seriously though, are they that special? All around the world you find women heading a revolution to get even more women in tech leadership positions. They  have all sorts of conferences and programs to mentor their juniors. They even have code camps  just for them. Technology is male oriented field you may think, women should just go do what they do best, play with barbie dolls, raise families and so forth. And thats where we go wrong. A little ride through history reveals something else.  


Ada Lovelace.(English mathematician)
 Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer. She wrote notes on Charles Babbage's engine which is synonymous to saying she wrote the first algorithm to be carried by a machine. 

Grace Hopper.(American computer  scientist)
Every women in tech revolution knows about Grace Hopper. She knew all about women in tech applications. She was a curious one, she dismantled 7 alarm clocks when she was 7. She was the third programmer of the Harvard Mark I. She coined the term "bug" that no programmer is unfamiliar with. She died with awards from 30 different universities and of course the Grace Hopper conference.

Hedy Lamar(Austrian actress)
She invented a device that led to the development of bluetooth and wifi, which for some reason was ignored for the next 40 years. Long story short we owe her big time. 


Human computers.(American mathematicians)
During world war II ,a computer was not machine but a profession. Mostly women with degrees in Math did it because as you might guess, they were good at it. They solved equations to produce tables that were used by gunnery officers to produce machines . Wen the ENIAC computer was made , women from this group were the first ones to programme it. 

Lise Meitner:(an Austrian physicist) 
Lise was on the team that discovered nuclear fission. Clearly she was a good physicsit even though the Nobel prize committee skipped her due to negative personal opinions. Well , even so we still have the element Meitnerium named after her. 



Henrietta Swan Leavitt(American astronomer)
Without Henrietta's contribution we wouldn't be able to determine the distance of distant galaxies from us. She discovered the relationship between the luminosity and period of Cepheid variable stars. If you've come across Hubble's law that states that the universe is expanding then you should also know that it wouldn't materialise without Henrietta's contribution.


Jocelyn Bell Burnell:( Irish Astrophysicist)
Jocelyn discovered the first radio pulsars. Even though her thesis adviser took credit for it, We'll still applaud for her contribution to astrophysics. 


Emmy Noether(German mathematician)
Newton once wrote , "If I have seen further, it is from sitting on the shoulders of giants." Well, Emmy was one of the giants that Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener stood on. She made groundbreaking contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. Her theorem has been able to explain the connection between symmetry and conservation law. 


Martha Cortson:(American inventor)
Martha simply took off where her husband left off. She then came up with signal flares that are used in the military today. When her husband she finished off his work on signal flares, acquired patents for it and even started a company out of it. And that was in the 1870's , before women empowerment was spoken of. 



So what's this buzz around women in tech? Well, we invented technology, technology defines our future and we can't leave half of the world's population from it. We are as good in technology as our male counterparts, We have to suffer from society's bias against us so if a revolution is needed to turn things around, let it be! Long before men declared tech their field, we invented it.