Computer scientist, Frances Allen known for her compiling work dies at 88

 

Computer scientist, Frances Allen known for her compiling work dies at 88.

Frances Allen was a lady whose work and a legend whose work on computer compiling helped established a foundation for modern computing and programming.She is popularly known as the first female who won the Turing Award.  

Frances Elizabeth Allen was an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. According to Wikipedia, Allen was the first female IBM fellow and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing Award. Her achievement includes seminal work in compilers, program optimization, and parallelization.she worked for IBM from 1957 to 2002 and was subsequently a fellow Emerita. 

The Turing Award is an annual award given by the association for Computing Machinery, to an individual selected for contribution of "lasting and major technical importance to the computer field".

Turing Award is generally recognized as the highest distinction computer science or the "Nobel Prize of computing".

Allen was the one who made the convertion of software programs into ones and zero—more efficient.

After receiving master's degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan, Allen took a job offer with IBM research in Poughkeepsie, NY, 1957, with intentions to stay until she had her student loan debt paid off.She served as IBM's language liaison with the National Security Agency, where she helped designed and build alpha which IBM recognize as a very high level code breaking language which featured the ability to create new alphabets  beyond the system defined alphabets.

She taught IBM employees the basics of the new Fortran language, which she later became one of the three designers for the company's Stretch-Harvest project. 

She built an experimental compiler for IBM's advance computing system, and from 1980 to the mid 1990's WHr headed a research team at IBM working on a receipt of parallel computing. Which later on became widely and commonly used in personal computers. 

Allen spent 45 years with IBM retiring in 2002, four years later she won the Turing Award then she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame and received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association of Women Computing.