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Or maybe you were accidentaly balancing your statement in octal?

Anybody interested in visualizing hyperspace should learn about Alicia Boole Stott and her amazing story. She was the daughter of George Boole (of boolean algebra fame) who developed a mind-boggling series of paper cutout models of four dimensional objects that won her an honorary math doctorate in 1914. Check out these extensive photos of her work.

I really support the parent on this one. The author shows a deep lack of respect for women, and for geeks. Here's my list, and I left a little room on it for your favorites.

Emmy Noether
Hedy Lamar
Marie Curie
Rosalind Franklin did all the x-ray diffraction heavy lifting for those punks watson and crick
Lise Meitner co-discovered the fission of uranium
Emilie du Chatelet http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath595/kmath595.ht m
Mileva Maric einstien's ubergeek first wife, to whom some credit a lot of special relativity.
Hypatia mathematician, philosopher, martyr. http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/hypatia.ht m

All should be on wikipedia.

You go girls!

Hedy Lamarr FOR SURE.

Also Sophie Germain http://www.agnesscott.edu/Lriddle/women/germain.ht m Gauss' little pen-pal

That takes care of Paris Hilton and Lisa fscking Simpson.

Then to get rid of Krotoski you could have good ol' Alicia Boole Stott, 4-D geek estraordinaire --

http://www.agnesscott.edu/Lriddle/women/stott.htm

Hedy Lamarr FOR SURE.

Also Sophie Germain http://www.agnesscott.edu/Lriddle/women/germain.ht m Gauss' little pen-pal

That takes care of Paris Hilton and Lisa fscking Simpson.

Then to get rid of Krotoski you could have good ol' Alicia Boole Stott, 4-D geek estraordinaire --

http://www.agnesscott.edu/Lriddle/women/stott.htm

I'd call it Hypatia.

A lot of my best maths and computing teachers were women.
That at UCL.
System's Analysis, Functional Programming and Calculus to cite a few.
Because it's been a while now - I can't find their personal pages.

So many great mathematicians were women so why do they shy away from computing?
I.T is dying collapsing we don't need an exodus right now.
So in future we will have what zero participation of women in Computing? Fine desert us!

Also I find women (imho) are much better than men at teaching, presentation and communication.
All of which very related to Computing.
The authors Linda Bostock and Sue Chandler are but one example that comes to mind.

Men are crap teachers mostly.
You often hear of a bad male teacher, but rarely a crap lady teacher.

There is only one thing us men do better than women.
And that is cooking :)
Get your girlfriend to cook for you and expect to eat overcooked burnt goo.

"Ahm ... tastes alright if you drown it in catchup" - she says.

While I agree that society, historically, has been very discouraging of accepting women into fields like science, mathematics, and engineering, I think it's important that we ask ourselves *why* this grew to be the case. Was it because our society was male-dominated, or perhaps because women were typically (for valid or not reasons) thought to have less aptitude in these domains?

Is society was simply male dominated, why did it become that way?

The trend I've noticed in these types of studies are that we typically try to identify whether these problems are biological or social. Can't they be both? Perhaps there are biological reasons that drove the social attitudes that we have today, even if we dislike them.

I'm glad that - irregardless of whether or not men are typically "hard-wired" to be more proficient in certain fields than women - women are now given a choice in the matter. My Master's supervisor (combinatorics) was an absolutely brilliant woman, as were about half the students in my lab. Even if women tend, as a biological trend, to be less adept at math than men, as a trend, tend to be, there are certainly some women who are astoundingly brilliant when it comes to mathematics. Emmy Noether is my strongest role model.

All three of these women (and others on the referenced list) contributed something fundamental in mathematics. In the case of Hopper and Lovelace, those contributions were absolutely fundamental to the way all of our computers work. Yes, those computers that we spend all this time working and playing on, the computers that take orders, show us the news, allow us to discuss things, save lives, make the 21st-Century economy possible.

If you're a man, tell me how much better you'd have been than Ada Lovelace at translating a treatise on the Analytical Engine in the 1830's and adding annotations that run to ten times the length of the original document. While she was at it, she raised and discussed the idea of (and what's now one of the standard objections to) Artificial Intelligence, the universality of computers, the fact that the study of algorithms and procedural mathematics, deserved to be recognized as a new and distinct field, the possibility of computer-generated music, and a couple of algorithms that are recognized as amongst the first "computer programs." Yeah, that girl didn't know math at all.

If you're a man, tell me how much faster you could have invented FLO-MATIC or COBOL than Grace Hopper did, or how much money you made explaining computers to white-haired businessmen with a "nanosecond" of fiber optic cable in one hand and a "microsecond" of cable coiled in the other. Hopper didn't understand math at all, that's why they named a giant Navy boat bristling with computers and weapons in her honor.

And I'm not even a mathematician or an academic. I'm sure Slashdot readers could fill in their favorites that I don't even know about.

The fact is that there are and have always been talented men in this field, but these women took interest and initiative, and did something wonderful, before a man did it.

Is there a geek among us, male or female, who hasn't enjoyed explaining math to a non-geek, male or female, and then seeing the light of understanding dawn in that other person? This takes patience and time as all teaching does, and one of the hardest hurdles is convincing your "student" (perhaps a friend, using a pen and some bar napkins) that they really are capable of grasping this thing.

What a rush, and from my standpoint that economist would have made better use of his time perhaps speaking from his own mathematical expertise than declaiming who can and can't understand mathematics.

Math is for everybody and anybody who's interested. People that make generalizations about who can and can't understand math or anything else really piss me off. Feynman had a phrase (I think it's from the Preface to the Lectures on Physics), here adapted from its original meaning, "Respect for our subject did not permit this."

A little respect please, for the math and the women who can excel in it just like men.

All three of these women (and others on the referenced list) contributed something fundamental in mathematics. In the case of Hopper and Lovelace, those contributions were absolutely fundamental to the way all of our computers work. Yes, those computers that we spend all this time working and playing on, the computers that take orders, show us the news, allow us to discuss things, save lives, make the 21st-Century economy possible.

If you're a man, tell me how much better you'd have been than Ada Lovelace at translating a treatise on the Analytical Engine in the 1830's and adding annotations that run to ten times the length of the original document. While she was at it, she raised and discussed the idea of (and what's now one of the standard objections to) Artificial Intelligence, the universality of computers, the fact that the study of algorithms and procedural mathematics, deserved to be recognized as a new and distinct field, the possibility of computer-generated music, and a couple of algorithms that are recognized as amongst the first "computer programs." Yeah, that girl didn't know math at all.

If you're a man, tell me how much faster you could have invented FLO-MATIC or COBOL than Grace Hopper did, or how much money you made explaining computers to white-haired businessmen with a "nanosecond" of fiber optic cable in one hand and a "microsecond" of cable coiled in the other. Hopper didn't understand math at all, that's why they named a giant Navy boat bristling with computers and weapons in her honor.

And I'm not even a mathematician or an academic. I'm sure Slashdot readers could fill in their favorites that I don't even know about.

The fact is that there are and have always been talented men in this field, but these women took interest and initiative, and did something wonderful, before a man did it.

Is there a geek among us, male or female, who hasn't enjoyed explaining math to a non-geek, male or female, and then seeing the light of understanding dawn in that other person? This takes patience and time as all teaching does, and one of the hardest hurdles is convincing your "student" (perhaps a friend, using a pen and some bar napkins) that they really are capable of grasping this thing.

What a rush, and from my standpoint that economist would have made better use of his time perhaps speaking from his own mathematical expertise than declaiming who can and can't understand mathematics.

Math is for everybody and anybody who's interested. People that make generalizations about who can and can't understand math or anything else really piss me off. Feynman had a phrase (I think it's from the Preface to the Lectures on Physics), here adapted from its original meaning, "Respect for our subject did not permit this."

A little respect please, for the math and the women who can excel in it just like men.

And Charles Babbage. The first hackers.

Admiral Grace Hopper really was an amazing woman. Born in 1906, she didn't fit ANY of the stereotypes for geeks. Active Duty Navy, oldest on active duty, created COBOL... Check out the following links....
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/hopper.htm
http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-w it.html
Truly Amazing!

No, not Ada, COBOL.

Ada - not ADA BTW - is named after Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, programmer of Charles Babbage's devices.

There's at least one good biography of "Amazing Grace" Hopper on the web. A google search using the keywords "Grace Hopper" COBOL will find you more.

Oh yes, GRACE in this case is Graduate Robot Attending a ConferencE.

Fo example, I propose starting the "quilt" at one corner and creating a potentially infinite quilt of diagonal shape, ordered in the following fashion, starting with tile 1, then tile 2, etc. (similar to the proof that the rational numbers are countable :)

1 2 6 7 15 16
3 5 8 14 17
4 9 13 18 .
10 12 19 .
11 20 .
21 23
22

The result would then be a quilt that _progresses_ across the middle as each tile has something in common with its neighbors. New ideas/designs would be more likely to appear on the edges where each new tile has fewer neighbors, whereas the bulk of similarity and progression would fall across the top-left to bottom-right diagonal.

I like your idea. Your patern would be fairly interesting, and may even have artistic merit, depending on if the artists took it seriously.

It may also be interesting to show only a thin portion of the neighbors (scaled for my 5x9 Font):

..NNNNNNNNN..
..NNNNNNNNN..
WW.........EE
WW.........EE
WW.........EE
WW.........EE
WW.........EE
..SSSSSSSSS..
..SSSSSSSSS..

There could be a requirement that your portion blend the edges together. Even the non-artistic may be able to contribute something interesting, and a program may even be able to contribute, or add "interesting" portions when the neighbors become boring. It may make for interesting wallpaper.

Also, you could use simple space filling fractals, such as the http://ecademy.agnesscott.edu/~lriddle/ifs/carpet/ carpet.htm> Sierpinski Carpet to assign new nodes, since there are infinite subdivisions to a fractal.

One final idea is to take a space filling fractal, and create the n+1 mosiac from the n mosiac. For instance, start with an image of Tux, divide it in 9, then have 9 artists create a new image, based on the edges of the other images. If the first image was divided like this:

111111111222222222333333333
111111111222222222333333333
111111111222222222333333333
111111111222222222333333333
111111111222222222333333333
444444444555555555666666666
444444444555555555666666666
444444444555555555666666666
444444444555555555666666666
444444444555555555666666666
777777777888888888999999999
777777777888888888999999999
777777777888888888999999999
777777777888888888999999999
777777777888888888999999999

, then artist #1 would get a seed that looks like this:

97777777778
3.........2
3.........2
3.........2
3.........2
3.........2
64444444445
, where I've wrapped around the edges so that the artist gets 4 sides. In other words, the artist replaces his tile, without knowing what the other artist will replace their tiles with.

Once the first iteration is done, the image would be divided 9x9=81 times, and farmed out to 81 artists. This keeps going as long as you want. It would be interesting to see what Tux (or whatever seed image you used) would look like after a few iterations.

Damn - I have real work to do, but I now want to go create a program to do something like this. I also have a suspicion it will devolve into the JPEG encryption algorithm...

Good question. I've always thought I would like to do a degree at some point, my mother got hers at 43, but I think that actually taking three years off work is now out of the question.

To be honest, I don't think that qualifications count for much when you are older. The story from a lot of late starters seems to be that the qualifications didn't open the doors they expected.

If I were you I would try trading on already established skills whilst angling to gain new ones. If I had experience in a scientific field (I wish!) I would probably look at the hybrid IT roles and try to find a path in that way - don't know what scientific branch you were in but there seem to be a lot of relatively new fields, such as bio-infomatics, that are requiring quite a mix of skills. I might scan the New Scientist job ads and write to some of the companies on spec, show them a resume and ask them what skills or qualifications they would recommend acquiring. For the cost of a few stamps you might get some advice at least.

And you can teach yourself to code at any age, if you want to. There are massive repositories of information online, get stuck in and find out how to use all that knowledge. If the industry is where you want to be, then read industry magazines religiously, learn it's history, traipse around trade shows. I think that it will require a ton of work on your part, and that a lot will depend on your self-discipline, will-power, self-confidence, presentation and ability to take knocks. The Industry can be hard and unfeeling to people of every age, as no doubt you have read here. You will also have to ignore your age in order that others will ignore it.

But don't just get into computing for the sake of it, get into something you like!

I don't think I'm very inspiring but Grace Murray Hopper was.

You will find that Ada Lovelace (full name Augusta Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace) is mentioned in the article (at the bottom) along with the fact that the ADA programming language was named after her. No mention of Tom Stoppard though.