Here’s my Ada Lovelace Day blog post.

Professor Barbara Liskov has won the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2009 A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in science and engineering, for her pioneering work in the design of computer programming languages. Her achievements underpin virtually every modern computing-related convenience in people’s daily lives. Every time you exchange e-mail with a friend, check your bank statement online or run a Google search, you are riding the momentum of her research. She is only the second woman to win this award.

Barbara was the first U.S. woman to earn a PhD from a computer science department. Her early innovations in software design have been the basis of every important programming language since 1975, including Ada, C++, Java and C#.

I admire Barbara because she was working in computing when very few women were. She helped form the foundation for todays computing. In her interviews she speaks about there being very few guidelines for computing work and research. She says of one of her early jobs she was handed a Fortran manual and told to start work.

I just want to say congratulations on winning the award!

Links to find out more:
Science Friday podcast or listen online – it’s very well worth listening to!!!!!! interview
Wikipedia article
The Technology Chronicles blog
MIT News Office Interview

Also if you Google “Professor Barbara Liskov” you’ll get a lot more.