Welcome to the homepage for my women in Math, Stats, and CS playing cards. I created these cards with the goal of educating others about the impact that women have had in STEM and getting more women excited to participate in the field! No profit was made in the creation and distribution of these decks–all proceeds were donated to charities supporting the engagement of women in STEM.
Ada Lovelace was an mathematician from the 1800s. She is considered by many to be the first ever computer programmer for writing an algorithm for a computing machine called the analytical engine, which was developed by inventor Charles Babbage. Lovelace made notes on how the engine could be used to handle not just numbers, but letters and symbols, and also theorized the method of code looping. Her contributions had little to no impact while she was alive and were not known on a widespread scale until 1953, when her work was published by BV Bowden in Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines.
Adele Goldberg is a computer scientist, known for being one of the creators of the programming language Smalltalk-80, which was influential in the development of many of the world's top object-oriented programming languages today (Java, Python, Ruby, etc.). Smalltalk also proved to be a key tool in the development of the agile development methodology, which centers on the idea of iterative development.
Anita Borg was a computer scientist who founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing---an annual series of conferences designed to highlight the work of women in computing---and the Institute for Women in Technology---a nonprofit focused on recruiting and advancing women in the technology sector.
Annie Easley was a mathematician and computer programmer who broke down barriers for women and people of color in tech. She was one of the first African-American employees to serve as a human computer at NASA, eventually working as a programmer to develop rockets and hybrid battery technology. She was very invested in outreach efforts, participating in tutoring programs at schools and working to inspire women and minorities to go into STEM.
Betty Jean Bartik, also known as just Jean Bartik or Betty Jean Jennings, was one of the original programmers of the ENIAC (Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer), which was developed at the end of WWII to calculate ballistic trajectories for military weapons. It was the first large scale computer of its kind, paving the way for many of the modern computers of today. Bartik and her colleagues worked to develop many of the fundamentals of programming and---arguably---to develop the discipline of computer programming itself.
Betty Holberton, like Betty Jean Bartik, was also one of the original programmers of the ENIAC. She helped write the first ever sort/merge function using binary trees and also wrote the first statistical analysis package.
Bin Yu is currently Chancellor's Professor in the Departments of Statistics and Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. She has done a lot of important work around creating a framework for veridical data science, which focuses on "responsible, reliable, reproducible, and transparent analysis" and is also known for investigating the theory behind the method of deep learning.
Brenda Laurel is a researcher and designer of video games who helped pioneer the development of virtual reality and advocated for diversity and inclusion in video game design. Her project Placeholder was the first VR project to separate direction of gaze from direction of movement, use natural imagery, and allow for two-hand control.
Carol Shaw was one of the first ever female programmers in the history of video game design. She worked at Atari in the 1970s and is known for developing the hit Activision game River Raid.
Christine Darden is a mathematician, data analyst, and engineer who spent many years at NASA researching supersonic flight. She was the first African-American Woman at Langley Research Center to be promoted to the top rank of the federal civil service.
Dorothy Vaughan was a mathematician who worked as a computer for NASA. She was the first African-American woman to be promoted to the role of supervisor in the computing program, where she led the teaching of Fortran and headed the Analysis and Computation Division programming group.
Elizabeth Feinler is an information scientist, known for pioneering and managing the forerunners of the modern Internet---the ARPANET, the Defense Data Network, and Network Information Centers---for the US Department of Defense. She was part of the group who developed the Internet domain scheme used today (.com, .gov, .net, etc.).
Emmy Noether was a mathmatician who contributed to the field of abstract algebra. She is best known for developing Noether's Theorem, which was influential in the field of theoretical physics, letting physicists get conserved quantities from symmetries in nature.
Euphemia Haynes was a mathematician and teacher and the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D in mathematics (in 1943). In her teaching career, she became the first woman chair of the Washington DC Board of Education, where she fought against racial discrimination in schools and contributed ideas that eventually led to the end of the discriminatory practice of the track system.
Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in statistical visualization. She developed the polar area diagram (similar to a circular histogram) and used her statistical knowledge to make a big impact on human lives, working to improve public health and sanitation in India. Although not directly related to mathematics, statistics, or computer science, she was also incredibly influential in the field of nursing, setting an example for treatment with compassion and commitment to care.
Frances Allen was a computer scientist who pioneered in the field of optimizing compilers, which work to minimize the run-time, memory usage, and/or storage space requirements for computer programs. Allen introduced many algorithms that laid the groundwork for today's optimization technologies.
Frances Spence was one of the original programmers of ENIAC, the first modern computer, and one of the first ever computer programmers in general.
Gertrude Mary Cox was a statistician known for her research in experimental design. Her book, Experimental Designs, was a primary reference in the design of experiments by statisticians for many years after its publication.
Gladys West is a mathematician known for contributing to the modeling of Earth's shape, as well as for her development of models that influenced the development of GPS. She was also the only the second black woman ever hired at the Naval Proving Ground (also known as the Naval Surface Warfare Center), where she served as a programmer and manager for satellite data analysis.
Grace Hopper was a computer scientist, known for inventing one of the first linkers, which allowed for taking multiple code files and combining them in to one program. She also devised the theory of machine-independent programming languages and created a language called FLOW-MATIC, which influenced the design of COBOL, a language still used today in large scale transaction processing.
Grace Wabha is a statistician who pioneered methods for smoothing out messy data sets. Even more famously, she developed the process of cross-validation, which is used to measure the performance of many machine learning models.
Hypatia lived in the 4th and 5th centuries, and is the first well-recorded female mathematician. She is said to have excelled her father in mathematics and to have been a very talented astronomer.
Ida Rhodes was a pioneer in the field of programming systems. She developed the C-10 programming language alongside Betty Holberton and also designed the first computer that was used by the Social Security Administration.
Ingrid Daubechies is known for studying the mathematical methods used for image compression technology, constructing continuous wavelets that only require finite processing.
Janet Norwood was the first female Commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. She worked to bring recognition to female leadership and served as the head, a board member, or an advisor to many different statistical organizations, including the American Statistical Association and the Urban Institute.
Jean Sammet was a computer scientist who is known for developing the FORMAC programming language and helping to develop COBOL, a language still used today in some business and administrative systems.
Joan Clarke was a cryptanalyst known for working as a code-breaker at the Allied code-breaking center Bletchley Park in WWII. She worked on the Enigma project, helping to decrypt Nazi Germany's communications in an effort that would prove immensely helpful to the Allied war effort.
Julia Robinson was a mathematician who contributed to computability theory and computational complexity theory. Her Ph.D thesis showed that rational number theory was an undecidable problem. She also worked to resolve a theorem formerly called Hilbert's tenth problem and now known as the MRDP theorem.
Katherine Johnson was a mathematician who contributed calculations that were critical for success in early US spaceflights. Working at NASA, she helped pioneer computer use for calculations and worked on projects related to Project Mercury, the Apollo Lunar Module, and the Space Shuttle program.
Kathleen Antonelli was one of the six programmers of the ENIAC, a pioneering device in computing. She is credited with developing the subroutine: a unit combining a sequence of programmed instructions that perform a specific task.
Kathryn Chaloner was a statistician who developed Bayesian experimental methods, writing the first work on an Bayesian optimal design theory for linear modeling, though she also provided contributions in the fields of outlier detection and analysis of residuals.
Kathryn Roeder is a statistician known for developing methods to uncover the genetic link for certain complex diseases. She has also contributed to literature on semi-parametric inference.
Margaret Hamilton was the director of software engineering at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and helped to develop software for the NASA Apollo program. Her work helped legitimize software development as a discipline within engineering, giving term "software engineering" much of the respect it now holds today.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi is considered the first woman to have earned a reputation for mathematics in the Western world. Her work on "Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth" comprehensively summarized algebra and even some calculus, which had only been developed relatively recently at the time Agnesi was writing.
Marjorie Lee Browne was an educator of mathematics and one of the first African-American women to receive a Ph.D and one of the first two to receive a Ph.D in mathematics. For a quarter decade, she was the only person in her department at North Carolina Central University to have a Ph.D, and she helped bring meaningful change to the school, obtaining its first computer for academic use.
Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer was one of the six programmers of ENIAC, the first all-purpose digital computer which laid the ground for modern computing tehcnology and programming standards.
Mary Jackson was a mathematician and aerospace engineer who earned the title of NASA's first black female engineer. She eventually became a manager of the NASA Affirmative Action Program and Federal Women's Program, working to push for the hiring and promotion of women at NASA.
Mary Ross was the first Native American female engineer and the first female engineer at the Lockheed Corporation. At Lockheed, she helped found the now famous Skunk Works aircraft design project and did a lot of work on aerospace design---for rockets, interplanetary travel, and satellites.
Mary Somerville studied mathematics and astronomy in the early 1800s. She published mathematical solutions to differential calculus problems and contributed to the visibility of mathematics in Britain. Somerville also served as tutor to Ada Lovelace (Ace of Hearts).
Mary Allen Wilkes was a computer programmer and logic designer known for her work on LINC, considered by some to be the first mini-computer, a predecessor of the personal computer. Wilkes worked to develop the operating system, which incorporated scrolling and controls to manipulate documents in real time.
Maryam Mirzakhani was a mathematician who earned the honor of being the first (and as of writing---only) woman to win the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in the field of mathematics, for her work on advanced geometry.
Mollie Orshansky was a statistician and economist. She developed the Orshansky Poverty Thresholds, now used in the United States to determine which households are considered to be poor, based on the cost of a nutritionally sufficient diet.
Nan Laird has produced many influential papers in the field of biostatistics. She is most known for writings on the expectation-maximization algorithm, a method to find local maxima and minima for statistical model parameters.
Nancy Reid is a theoretical statistician, known for her contributions to the theory of statistical inference, profile likelihood, and approximations to significance functions. Her work has also focused on the interaction between Bayesian and frequentest methodologies.
Radia Perlman is a programmer and network engineer, known for inventing the spanning-tree protocol, which is essential to allowing for the merging of multiple communication networks.
Ruth Teitelbaum was one of the first ever computer programmers, working to develop the ENIAC. Having previously spent time manually calculating ballistic trajectories, she worked to develop software that would do this for her and help work to end the era of manual computing.
Shafi Goldwasser has had a big impact in the world of cybersecurity, co-inventing probabilistic encryption, which set up what is now the gold standard for encryption methodology. She has also done work in complexity theory, helping to classify approximation problems.
Sofya Kovalevskaya was a 19th century mathematician who contributed to the fields of analysis, partial differential equations, and mechanics. She was also the first female editor of a scientific journal and the first woman to become a full professor in northern Europe.
Sophie Germain was an 18th and 19th century French mathematician and physicist who pioneered elasticity theory and made important contributions surrounding Fermat's Last Theorem. Although she tried, despite her clear talent she was sadly unable to make a living from mathematics due to prejudice against her because of her sex.
Sophie Wilson is a computer scientist who worked to design the BBC Micro (a set of microcomputers and peripherals made for a computer literacy project by the British Broadcasting Corporation) and ARM architecture for computer processors.
Dame Stephanie "Steve" Shirley was a big promoter of workplace equality in her career, working to build a tech empire in the 1960s with an all-female and work-from-home staff from women who had left their careers after becoming mothers. She promoted return to work, flexibile work policy, and ideas of profit-sharing and job-sharing.
Winifred Edgerton Merrill was the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, which she received from Columbia in 1886. Later on, she helped draft proposals for the foundation of Barnard College, which was New York City's first secular higher education institution to offer women a degree in liberal arts.