She did a lot of cool work on compiler optimizations in the 1960s, and work in the 70s on parallel systems. She’s also the first woman to receive this award since the ACM started handing them out in 1966. It’s cool that a woman finally received it, but an unfortunate comment on the state and history of our field. It’s interesting, for example, that John Cocke (who she co-authored numerous papers with) received the Turing Award fully 20 years ago. We can hope that honoring her is a sign of the slow process of change, but we’ll obviously need to continue to actively work on broadening our community.
Category: Science
Science at work
For his 7th grade science project, Sub-Evil Boy studied the effect of different kinds of wrapping (foil, wax paper, etc.) on protecting slices of bread from freezer burn.
One of my parental roles was to take photos that he could use as part of his display. I quite liked this one of various slices of bread fresh out of the freezer and waiting to be weighed, but it was deemed too “artsy” :-). So I get to post it on Flickr (and here on my blog)!
(Between my sister and I, he also got way more advice on data analysis, statistics, and graphing than any poor 7th grader should be subjected to. Makes for some very nice results, though.)
He did quite well at the local science fair in early January, and is headed off to the regional competition on Saturday. Huzzah!
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