Fran Allen Wins Turing Award

shoemortgage writes "The Association for Computing Machinery has named Frances E. Allen the recipient of the 2006 A.M. Turing Award for contributions that fundamentally improved the performance of computer programs in solving problems, and accelerated the use of high performance computing. Allen,74, is the first woman to receive the Turing Award in the 41 years of its history. She retired from IBM in 2002."

Comments

Ironic

[wombatmobile]

I was glad to hear Fran Allen had won the Turing prize and went searching for an inspirational quote that would help me to appreciate the genius that sets her apart from other humans.

But alas... I only found these.

So I'm left wondering... maybe Fran Allen IS a computer...(?)

In which case... I'm excited! Fran Allen deserves the Turing prize!

Fran on Wikipedia

[shudde]

Without getting too far into discussing whether she merited the award or not, since I'm not really qualified to judge. I find it interesting that her Wikipedia entry was only created on 6 February 2007 by a username that has made no other edits. I've always found the Wikipedia coverage of computer science fairly comprehensive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran_Allen
Edit history of Jtaylord

Re:Fran on Wikipedia

[TheRaven64]

I've always found the Wikipedia coverage of computer science fairly comprehensive Coverage of computer science is good. Coverage of computer scientists is not. I was sent a link to a computer scientist on Wikipedia a few weeks ago, and it had the 'this is a stub' header across it. I tried searching for a few people I knew to be leaders in fields I've interacted with, and found that some were stubs and most didn't exist. Few people since Church and Turing have full articles, including most of the recent winners of the Grace Murray Hopper Award.