Betty Shannon’s husband Claude was a scientific rock star of the mid-1900s, helping to usher in the computer age. While Claude was well-known to both scientific circles and the general public, few realised Betty was his closest collaborator.
Statistician Dr. Alison Harcourt is best known for co-defining the branch and bound algorithm—a way of solving optimisation problems by breaking them into smaller problems—with Ailsa Land.
Dorothy M. Hoover was a pioneer in the field of aeronautical mathematics and physics. The granddaughter of enslaved people, she overcame the significant obstacles facing African American women in the Jim Crow era of the twentieth century to earn advanced degrees in mathematics and physics.
In 1967, Christine Darden was added to the pool of ‘human computers’ who wrote complex programs and tediously crunched numbers for engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center. But Darden wanted to do more than process the data — she wanted to create it.
She became the first African-American hired into a technical position at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as a ‘computer’. JPL sent her on a programming training course at IBM and she learnt speed coding and was promoted to ‘mathematician’.
Irish Dominican sister, educator and mathematician
Catherine Mary Prime was Australia’s first female actuary, becoming a fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of Australia (IAA) in 1971.
1600s Italian scholar, one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university and the first to receive a Doctor of Philosophy
Jennifer Roma Seberry is Professor and former Head, Department of Computer Science at the University of Wollongong.
During World War II she worked at the Rolls-Royce factory, mathematically modelling the stress in aircraft engines, while undertaking an engineering from the University of London at night.